Proper support for a popup statusbar has been added -- a whole 1 line needed rewriting :-) Assuming you have something like dzen[1] running, say as: while true ; do date ; sleep 30 ; done \ | dzen2 -ta r -fg '#a8a3f7' -bg '#3f3c6d' -p & Which displays a 15 pixel high status bar at the top of the screen, you'd edit your Config.hs, change defaultStatusGap from 0 to 15, and reload. mod-b will then toggle on or off the status bar. Screenshots: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/xmonad-web/images/screen-rob-status-sp... http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/xmonad-web/images/screen-dons-status.p... The 'gap' is just a pixel gap, so you could put any permanent (or pop up) content in that gap. Any client that ignores the window manager would be suitable to use as a 'status bar'. By the way, the 'gap' height for a given font is calculable using the script in utils/gapcalc.c, courtesy of Rob, dzen's creator. -- Don 1. http://gotmor.googlepages.com/dzen