Re: [xmonad] automatically generating template xmonad.hs if it doesn't exist

On 2008.01.04 10:23:52 -0800, Don Stewart scribbled 1.0K characters:

daveroundy:

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On Jan 4, 2008 1:12 PM, Brent Yorgey wrote:

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If you never customise xmonad, then that runtime dependency isn't required. But maybe that doesn't matter?

Well, that's a good point. An idea to get around this easily would be to copy the template to a file called something different (e.g. xmonad.hs.customize-me) with a comment at the top saying to rename it to xmonad.hs . I really can't imagine there will be many (if any) users that use xmonad without customizing it, though (?).

Another possibility would simply be to only compile xmonad.hs if ghc is in the path. So the only runtime overhead of putting that xmonad.hs there (if ghc isn't installed) would be to check the PATH for ghc. Doesn't seem too onerous for those mythical users who are content with xmonad's default configuration.

Maybe it's also time to look at the default configuration, so that more people are satisfied with it.

-- Don

Well, we could revisit some old decisions. # Does it *have* to be mod1Mask? It makes more sense to steal Alt than Ctrl, I'll grant, but stealing the useless Windows is even better since even fewer apps use that; I notice that there are at least 4 or 5 configs on the wiki which change mod1Mask to mod4Mask. # Maybe change the default border colors. Looking through the configs, I don't see much consistency though. # Random note on configs: they seem to either be long or short, with all the long ones doing complex stuff with Dzen; I don't use Dzen and don't entirely understand what they are doing, but it looks pretty repetitious. This seems like a fruitful area to examine for abstracting and factoring out stuff. Similar comments apply with Xmobar, although the situation doesn't seem as bad there. # Add some more convenience functions for manipulating keymaps. Look at Rossato's config in XMC - you see line after line of stuff like

, ((modMask x , xK_F6 ), windowPromptBring defaultXPConfig )

Bleh. -- gwern 777 bce data-haven NSV 2600 NAWAS devices nowhere the Bess