On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 10:43:26AM -0700, Sergey Manucharian wrote:

Hi Matthias-Christian,

Hi Sergey,

Excerpts from Matthias-Christian Ott's message of Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:24 +0100:

...

I tried xmobar, which had problems with background colors, and dzen2 (with dmplex and multiple instances). None of these status bars supports mouse interaction, so they aren't a choice for me.

That's not exactly correct. Dzen2 DOES support mouse interaction, at least the svn version. I don't use mouse interaction with xmonad's status bar (though it can be implemented), but I have several gadgets based on dzen2 and using mouse clicks.

Yes, you are right. You could write a hook to read input from dzen2 or use wmctrl for this [1]. But dzen2 also does single-pass rendering, which isn't acceptable for me. It's not that what I want to have is impossible with existing software and some tricks, but I prefer a solution with a good rendering engine (cairo and pango?) and support for higher order functions. Of course a solution that is not "quick and dirty" takes more time to develop and design, but I think it could be useful to the community. The problem is just, that I'm not a particullary good haskel programmer and probably won't write good code at the first try. So if any Haskell wizard would be willing to write the initial code or there is good existing code, that would be much better.

Cheers, Sergey

Regards, Matthias-Christian [1] http://www.doitian.com/2009/09/clickable-dzen2-panel-for-xmonad/

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 11:24:00AM -0500, John Yates wrote:

You do not say of what the rest of your environment consists. If you are using Gnome you can get a very nice clickable single panel, much like dwm, dzen2 or xmobar. I run Ubuntu Karmic and have done just that. I posted earlier version (xmonad 0.8) to http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive (look for John Yates).

The rest of my environment consits of several urxvts/uxterms and firefox. Regards, Matthias-Christian

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 08:29:38PM -0500, John Yates wrote:

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:

...

The rest of my environment consits of several urxvts/uxterms and firefox.

(Please forgive me if the following attempt to extrapolate from your brief response is off target.)

It sounds like you are a "dyed in the wool" command-line user. Further, it sounds like you are saying that not only do you _not_ run a mainstream window manager but also that you choose _not_ to run any of the components associated with a mainstream GUI desktop environment.

None of the mainstream desktop environments meets my needs (I tried them for several years), though I really appreciate visualisation. It may sound a bit odd, but software that uses technology and concepts from an era when people used dot matrix printers and terminals simply works for me better. It's not that I'm happy with it, but I simply couldn't find something better.

I too am a command-line devotee though I run most of my shells within emacs. That said I am happy to run bits of the gnome GUI in a single bar across the top of my screen (gnome panel and a handful of applets). Within that panel I use dzen2 to displays what would otherwise appear on a title bar if I chose to have my windows so decorated. Again in that panel I have Mod4-p bound run dmenu for launching programs. And much as I love tiling window managers in general and xmonad in particular I still appreciate the Gnome Workspace Switcher's visual presentation of my 9 workspaces. (A picture can truly be worth many key strokes and much searching.)

Bottom-line: even after replacing my window manager I find that a desktop environment still offers many reusable components that I would never think of reinventing. I encourage you to read the wiki pages on xmonad integration with Gnome and/or KDE. (I use Gnome because it is Ubuntu's default environment and therefore best supported under that distribution.)

It was not long ago that you could live very well without GNOME and KDE. But since then people tried to unify hardware configuration and the result of this is hal, NetworkManager and GNOME Power Manager. This has the unpleasant result that nearly all major GNU/Linux distributions just work with them out of the box. You have a herd of daemons idling on your system (which aren't even decoupled from the user interface), not to mention the unnecessary abstraction and redundant security layers. If you choose to live without them, you have a hard life, because now you have to imitate their functionality with the previous generation software, just because developers want to give users graphical user interfaces. I really regret this development and developed a certain antipathy against GNOME and KDE. They don't fulfil my needs and make my life harder that it could be. Generally speaking, this is an outcome of the UNIX history, an operating system that is the evolution of Space Travel. The worse is better approach and general UNIX philosophy are just a bad joke.

/john

Regards, Matthias-Christian