Jan.Vornberger:
Hello,
my name is Jan Vornberger and I'm a student at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). I would like to introduce myself and the project that I will be working on for the next semester.
As part of my studies I have to work on a semester-long project. I decided to work on the question, how tiling window managers can be made more 'beginner-friendly' and how the barrier to entry can be lowered. I have decided to use XMonad as a basis for implementing my ideas. Therefore I wanted to introduce myself, as I will probably be asking a question here and there in the future. :-)
Wonderful! This is great news.
For those who are interested, here is a rough sketch on what I have in mind for my project: My goal is to create a modern tiling window manager that can be productively used with virtually no training, meaning most core functionality needs to be accessible in an intuitive way or drawing from well-known conventions in more conventional window managers. My target user is someone who wants to give tiling window managers a try, but doesn't want to learn keyboard commands (at least not in the beginning), read a detailed manual or write any sort of configuration file.
I'm planning to decide on a somewhat fixed configuration of XMonad, probably in combination with Gnome as a DE, and then trying to make this functionality available via mouse commands that - hopefully - will be easy to pick up.
Excellent.
I also want to completely rework the whole floating layer thing, as it seems to me to be a fairly foreing concept for a newcomer and it's awkward to use. My current idea is to instead use a floating layout algorithm, that could work similiar to a conventional window manager. It could even be set as the default layout algorithm. That way, the WM could almost be a 'drop-in' replacement for - let's say Metacity - greeting the user with the familiar concept of manipulating windows and then leading him to the tiling paradigm once he switches the layout.
I do believe that eventually the keyboard is a more effective way to control the WM, so I will also investigate the possibility of some kind of help system, that can point out how - for example - the last action, the user did, can be done with keyboard commands instead. Alternatively tooltips could also be used to display key bindings.
I have a little bit of experience with Haskell - that's one of the reasons I picked XMonad as the basis, as I enjoy programming in Haskell and want to get more experienced with it. However I'm completely new to X11 and window manager programming, which I will need to pick up.
That's it, the project in a nutshell. Any thoughts, pointers, related ideas, doubts or comments are most welcome. :-)
Will you be contributing back changes/modifications/... to the main xmonad source? What else can we do to help your effort? -- Don