On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 3:12 AM, Chris Jones
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 01:38:16PM EST, Adam Vogt wrote:
* On Monday, February 15 2010, Chris Jones wrote:
[..]
Obviously not for me to have a say in this, but I'd much prefer folks who have mastered this stuff wrote a detailed manual on xmonad configuration.
CJ
Hello Chris,
Hello Adam,
What is missing from the present documentation that you would like to see in this detailed manual?
I think that if I was able to provide a useful answer to your question, I should already be on my way to writing the manual. :-)
Seriously.. here's the context:
Over the years, I have toned down my current window manager of choice's functionalities to a barebones environment that does what I need and nothing else.. namely:
1. provide multiple workspaces
2. let me bind a few keyboard actions to launching frequently used applications, mainly 256-color xterms and differently configured instances of GNU screen
3. binding keys to navigating workspaces
Naturally, I wanted to do the same thing in xmonad, which once I had tried it out of the box basically amounted to changing default workspace navigation keybindings and adjusting the terminal definition.
One additional requirement, something I do not have in my current window manager setup was to have xmonad display stuff I like to keep an eye on at all times, such as CPU temperature, CPU%, mem%, swap%, network RX/TX, as well as the current date and time and outside temperature as recorded by my local weather station.
I was not planning on anything fancy, just numbers, pretty much what I have implemented via short home-grown scripts in my current GNU/screen environment, but with one important difference:
With my current setup, each instance of GNU/screen runs separate instances of my monitoring scripts, which is not optimal.
So my needs were very modest indeed, and after a bit of digging, some copy-pasting and the usual trial and error cycles, I was able to pretty much set up the above environment in xmonad without bothering anybody here or on the IRC channel with questions you folks must have already answered hundreds of times.
All the same, I have the following observations:
1. It would have been much better if I had been able to work with a document that walked me through the above configuration instead of having to dig for it in various places.
2. At this point, I have a file called xmonad.hs, that appears to do what I want, but since it was created by copy-pasting other users' configuration files, I have only a very vague idea how it does it.
For instance, I have the following:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ import XMonad import XMonad.Hooks.DynamicLog import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks import XMonad.Util.Run(spawnPipe) import XMonad.Util.EZConfig(additionalKeys) import System.IO ------------------------------------------------------------------------
What does this do? Why do I need it? Do I really need this? all of it?
And further down:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ main = do xmproc <- spawnPipe "/usr/bin/xmobar /home/me/.xmobarrc" xmonad $ defaultConfig { manageHook = manageDocks <+> myManageHook <+> manageHook defaultConfig ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hold on. Didn't you earlier write that
xmonad 0.8 as shipped by debian squeeze let me do everything I needed without additional customization.
That seems like both customization & usage of -contrib modules (at least 4 of them). What then did you mean earlier? -- gwern