First, I believe there's a problem with the quoting in David's post; he appears not to agree with me after all. Hopefully not too much confusion will arise. To elaborate a little further on the idea for PlainConfig. First, it works generally as Joachim described; a minimalist xmonad.hs that can be precompiled, and it reads the config file (~/.xmonad/xmonad.conf in this case) to construct the XConf, rather than using values from xmonad.hs. I see the argument about not fragmenting our configuration into many languages and forms, it would be too confusing. However, PlainConfig and xmonad.hs aren't going to coexist on one user's system at once. The former is extremely simple (key=value file) in form, and corresponds directly to familiar parts of xmonad.hs files. For a user who comes to xmonad, the PlainConfig file is a much lower learning and software dependency curve for him to climb at first. If he later wants more power than PlainConfig can provide, he should be able to use a planned tool for PlainConfig, that would "compile" the plain text xmonad.conf into an equivalent xmonad.hs file. That makes the transition to using an xmonad.hs file smoother, and the software demands are the same as they are now to starting with xmonad. As a practical example, I helped a friend install xmonad last weekend. The process went like this: 1) Install Ubuntu 8.04's GHC 6.8.2 package. 2) Grab the 0.7 source for core and contrib. 3) Grab X11 source and compile that. 4) Try to compile xmonad but it needs mtl. 5) Download and install mtl. 6) Finally compile xmonad. I knew what I was doing and it still took far longer than it should have. Not a good evangelism experience, and I'm fortunate it didn't put him off. (He likes xmonad, but thinks it's responsible for a problem he's having with a couple of apps, I'm looking into it.) In retrospect, the xmonad-0.7 packages from 8.04 might have been a better plan. I'm not sure if they depend on mtl or not, so there still might have been that manual step to get to xmonad.hs compilation. I'm not going to become the next arossato if the consensus goes against using PlainConfig. I think it's a good idea, but I respect the views of the other devs, and if this isn't a direction we want to go in, I won't storm off. I'm just of the opinion that this is a good idea, and I want to see it happen. Braden Shepherdson shepheb