I have been reading the xmonad development thread, and it got me to thinking about my experiences with xmonad. I definitely think things could be improved, but I'm not sure how would be best. Maybe it's all a documentation thing, or maybe some of it could be new or changed APIs. I'll just try to explain how I have experienced xmonad, and what gave me problems. First of all, as background, I am a programmer. I did a little Haskell at university, but not much and I use it so rarely that I can never remember the syntax. Mostly I program in C#, C++, Python and a little bit of Coffeescript. I run Ubuntu on a laptop and mostly only install stuff via apt-get. I like the command-line and vim, but I'm no anti-mouse purist and spend a lot of time using only the mouse or the touchpad while browsing the web. I think I first installed xmonad via apt-get, and at some point had some problem that meant moving to cabal or darcs. That was a bit of a pain, especially trying to understand where each of these things had put files and knowing whether I'd successfully uninstalled them later. What is much more of a pain is months later when I try to change something and realise I need to upgrade and then I'm not even sure how I installed xmonad in the first place, so I'm not sure what I need to do to update it. After an upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu there's generally a period of a few weeks before I find the time to figure out how to get xmonad up and running again. Configuring xmonad is generally pretty mystifying. Even though I have a basic knowledge of Haskell, it's often very hard to untangle things in the config file or in examples. Problems I've had: * Strange symbols, like ".|.", "|||", "-->", "=?", "<&&>". These can't be Googled for, so it's hard to find out what they do or where they're defined. Haskell already has lots of operators that aren't particularly familiar to programmers coming from other languages, so this just seems to add to the confusion. * Hard to find out where functions are defined. Example configuration files generally import all modules into the one big namespace. In Python, the equivalent construct, "from foo import *" is generally discouraged for this reason, but I don't know what's conventional in Haskell. It seems the forms "import Module (x,y,z)" or "import qualified Module" would be better for example configuration files, as they aid discoverability: then when I see a name used in a configuration file I can easily see which module it came from without having to grep through source files. * Poor layout documentation. One of the things I was most interested when I was a new user was in finding out what layouts were available and how to compose them. I found the layout documentation to be very limited. There's no overview and there are no diagrams, just a great big list of layout names, so to find anything you pretty much have to try them all one by one. Even worse, some of them require arguments that they do not document. E.g. http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Dishes.html If there is somewhere that shows example screenshots of all these layouts, it would be good if it was more prominently linked from the docs. * Baffling failure messages. If you make a mistake in your xmonad configuration, or if you upgrade and the API for something has changed, the error messages are generally very hard to understand, and it can take quite a deep understanding of Haskell to realise that you just missed out an argument or used the wrong operator. I think most of these things can be improved, though maybe not the error messages. I really love *using* xmonad, and I've not found another window manager that I'm nearly as happy with, but the horror of *configuring* xmonad wastes a lot of my time and makes me disinclined to recommend it to others. Weeble.