Re: [xmonad] Bluetile

I figured I'd jump in here to give a "beginner"'s perspective. I'm a non-programmer type who has been using Linux and Emacs for years for one reason -- a need to have some control of the process as well as the content when I write. For this reason I moved recently to tiling WMs. I tried wmii for a bit -- but hit bugs I wasn't able to solve easily. I tried a few others but was daunted by a user base downright hostile to non-programmers. Awesome worked well for me, but was poorly documented. Finally I found Xmonad -- which I love -- and I'm not turning back. It's fast, I can configure it pretty easily by looking through configurations on the Wiki and cutting and pasting, and most of all, it has a friendly following of smart folks who seem willing to help amateurs such as myself. That being said, I would have been thrilled had there been a version that might have helped me get up and running more easily. It took me almost a week to get a really good usable version going (I had most of my trouble getting xmobar to work well.) A fairly simple out-of-the-box version with good documentation that would have allowed a begiiner to delve more deeply gradually would have been heaven. In short, as a beginner, my ideal version of xmonad would be an out-of-the-box version with great *educationally oriented* documentation. I hope this is useful. d. On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Christian Walther wrote:

Hi,

2009/8/26 Thomas Friedrich : [...]

...

I agree, please don't mess up the Xmonad-Core.  I like Xmonad because its so different to any other WM.. simple, clean, elegant, customizable, and did I mention clean?

Same here. I really think that telling people about tiling is a good idea, and having a more "beginner friendly" branch like bluetile is also a good thing. I'm not sure how to put it without sounding rude or arrogant, but I like xmonad because of the reasons Thomas stated above, which, for me, includes (or rather means) the absence of "beginner friendly" features.

...

From my point of view there are many window managers that deal with "beginner friendly" features. Extending xmonads default configuration in this way would mean that it's "just another WM". It all comes down to packaging anyway. There are some cool configurations in the Wiki, why not create a package xmonad-gnome or xmonad-kde for example? I've to disagree with Gwern here: A normal user who doesn't know about xmonad probably doesn't want it. So in case someone selects xmonad as his window manager of choice, there should at least be some basic knowledge of xmonad and the way it deals with windows.

Christian _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad

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