"Gwern Branwen"
So, in my never-ending quest to have as short and concise an xmonad.hs as possible, I've turned my attention to my 'greenXPConfig'. This definition is eating up a gargantuan 10 lines of my xmonad.hs!
Thus, I'm wondering about people's use of 'defaultXPConfig'; from Prompt.hs:
defaultXPConfig :: XPConfig defaultXPConfig = XPC { font = "-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" , bgColor = "#333333" , fgColor = "#FFFFFF" , fgHLight = "#000000" , bgHLight = "#BBBBBB" , borderColor = "#FFFFFF" , promptBorderWidth = 1 , position = Bottom , height = 18 , historySize = 256 , historyFilter = id , defaultText = [] , autoComplete = Nothing , showCompletionOnTab = False }
According to my xmonad archive, 15 configurations make use of the default in some way. My question is: are these defaults really optimal?
I'll take them in order.
1) The font strikes me as a bad setting. I checked it out just now, and my eyes water at the tininess of 10. It seems to me that a far more reasonable setting would be something like 14 or 16; but I don't know whether a 16 setting would be alright for EE users. I feel though that 10 works out for no one.
10 seems perfect for me on a 1440x900 display with a font resolution of about 100dpi. 14 or 16 are way too big here. Font size is tricky, because it depends so much on resolution. OTOH, I use an xft font anyway, which wouldn't be a good default, so I'm not too concerned with what the default is.
2) The color scheme is currently a sort of white-on-grey. It lacks contrast, IMO. Here I have 2 suggestions: 2.1) The current color values are pretty opaque. Unless you have color-values memorized, ', bgColor = "#333333"' is absolutely meaningless to you. Intrigeri's xmonad.hs has a XPConfig which looks like: fgColor = "grey80" , bgColor = "grey22" , borderColor = "grey22"
The prompt appears much the same, but the values are far more comprehensible. Even if we don't change the color scheme, this would constitute a code cleanup IMO. 2.2) I would like to switch to either green text on black (which gets us bonus hacker points :) and better contrast), or white text on black - as opposed to white text on gray. Thoughts on either color scheme? (Green-on-black would be , bgColor = "black"\n, fgColor = "green" obviously.)
I happen to like these colors (they're surprisingly close to the ones I use for xterms, where I like a low contrast white on black), though I think simply having white on black is probably a saner default.
3) Do people actually like the border? 5 xmonad.hss specifically disable it by setting 'promptBorderWidth = 0'. I confess it just seems like wasted space to me. It's not like a dark-gray/green/black background make it hard to make out the prompt against the application window.
I leave the border on, otherwise it's difficult to read when I'm on a workspace with mostly terminals.
4) Positioning: top, or bottom? I myself am weakly in favor of top. The configs are odd here - there are ~4 which set to Top, and 5 or so which set it to Bottom. Even though Bottom is the default. 4 configurations override the config to put the box at the top of the screen. ???
I expect this is close to fifty-fifty in practice, so either default is just as good as the other. Personally, I like top.