So after some nudging from Rob, and Spencer, I added proper state logging to xmonad. If you set 'logging = True' xmonad will print its internal state to stdout on each state change. Then, using an external client, you can parse this info (the full state of the window manager!) and render it however you want. One use is to pretty print the workspace info into dzen, as if we had a built in status bar. There's a script in XMonadContrib now, scripts/xmonad-status.hs, which implements an example StackSet parser/pretty printer for status bars. Screenshots of workspace statusbars: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/xmonad-dzen-tags.png http://omploader.org/file/rob-dzen-status.png (the latter is a perl script Rob wrote, not in the repo yet). You run this thing by piping the output of xmonad into the pretty printer, e.g. xmonad | xmonad-status | dzen2 -ta l -fg '#a8a3f7' -bg '#3f3c6d' We'll probably settle on a dwm/wmii-ish exapmle status bar to distribute with xmonad. -- Don