On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 07:57:10PM +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote:
Hi,
I just wanted to stop by and say thanks for your great effort.
I discovered XMonad a couple of days ago during an upgrade of my aging system. I used to run Ion3, that is the expression of a given philosophy regarding usability, and I'm planning to switch to XMonad (I'm still in the progress of learning and customizing it, and it is going to take some time, since I'm a bit lazy recently).
I've been impressed with your design decisions (Don, please keep on blogging on that, you promised a lot in your first post, and I'll be keeping an eye on you!). Reading your code is quite of a hell of a learning experience for me.
I'd like to help, but I'm absolutely new to X Window programming - and, yes, XMonad is quite an incentive to study. I thought about making the source code haddock compatible (it could be useful for new comers like me). Do you think that could be useful?
It already is designed for haddock: -- | manage. Add a new window to be managed in the current workspace. -- Bring it into focus. -- -- Whether the window is already managed, or not, it is mapped, has its -- border set, and its event mask set. -- Personally, I'd like to see xmonad turned into .lhs, triply commented, and fed through lhs2TeX :)
I'd like to add support for hs-plugins (I love and use a lot the lua prompt in Ion3, and I've been dreaming about having an interactive Haskell prompt in my WM), but unfortunately hs-plugins does not work with ghc-6.6.1 (I've just upgraded and built a lot of knew exciting libraries, and I do not want to downgrade back to ghc-6.4.2. Don, could you help me with that? ;-). I'd like to start studying a tabbed layout as soon as I'll have a better understanding of the code base.
The darcs version of hs-plugins supports GHC 6.6.0, which as you might surmise from the version number supports most of the same features.
I must confess that by reading the XMonad site though, I had the slight impression that what you are actually trying do, your main goal, is to prove that Haskell, and its tool chain, allows the rapid development of the highest quality of code. This is not going to be a problem, I'd like to see people attracted to Haskell because of the possibility to write real world (I know, there's a book coming...:-), useful applications. This is my own experience after all.
But I'm watching for a different WM because the writer of my previous one came to think that people who patch it are infringing its trade mark, decided to change license and started threatening legal actions against community web sites and to distribute the WM as proprietary software...;-)
Haha. I switched from ion3 because it was too much work to keep the panes in a sane configuration...
Thanks for your code. Really.
Stefan