So Long, Farewell
XMonad folks... Just in case anyone wants feedback about why people may or may not choose to use XMonad, I thought I'd give some. I'm moving away from XMonad and back to the window manager I keep coming back to: Fvwm. This isn't because I hate XMonad, XMonad is cool. But I miss my eye-candy, and I miss the ability to move and resize floating windows with just the mouse (rather than mouse+key). I remember seeing a post here saying that there were two models for interacting with a window manager: (1) keyboard alone and (2) mouse and keyboard. But there's also mouse-alone. Sometimes one wishes to have a hand free, to drink a cuppa, eat a sandwich, whatever. Or one is using a laptop where "mouse" (touchpad) use requres two hands, one for the touchpad and the other for the buttons. XMonad doesn't support that. Then I found that it was easier to write a tiling module for Fvwm than to write eye-candy for XMonad. Part of that is because I'm familiar with Perl and I haven't (yet) learned enough about Haskell. Fvwm's modular design plus its Perl bindings enabled me to have somewhere to start, while I didn't know where to start with XMonad. Also, altering the decorations of XMonad seems to be a more daunting, low-level task than adding tiling behaviour to Fvwm. After beavering away for a few weeks, I've got my Fvwm tiling module working well enough, and so I no longer need to use XMonad. So, farewell. It's been fun, and I wish y'all well. Kathryn Andersen -- _--_|\ | Kathryn Andersen <http://www.katspace.org> / \ | \_.--.*/ | GenFicCrit mailing list <http://www.katspace.org/gen_fic_crit/> v | ------------| Melbourne -> Victoria -> Australia -> Southern Hemisphere Maranatha! | -> Earth -> Sol -> Milky Way Galaxy -> Universe
kat_lists:
XMonad folks... Just in case anyone wants feedback about why people may or may not choose to use XMonad, I thought I'd give some.
I'm moving away from XMonad and back to the window manager I keep coming back to: Fvwm. This isn't because I hate XMonad, XMonad is cool. But I miss my eye-candy, and I miss the ability to move and resize floating windows with just the mouse (rather than mouse+key). I remember seeing a post here saying that there were two models for interacting with a window manager: (1) keyboard alone and (2) mouse and keyboard. But there's also mouse-alone. Sometimes one wishes to have a hand free, to drink a cuppa, eat a sandwich, whatever. Or one is using a laptop where "mouse" (touchpad) use requres two hands, one for the touchpad and the other for the buttons. XMonad doesn't support that.
Then I found that it was easier to write a tiling module for Fvwm than to write eye-candy for XMonad. Part of that is because I'm familiar with Perl and I haven't (yet) learned enough about Haskell. Fvwm's modular design plus its Perl bindings enabled me to have somewhere to start, while I didn't know where to start with XMonad. Also, altering the decorations of XMonad seems to be a more daunting, low-level task than adding tiling behaviour to Fvwm. After beavering away for a few weeks, I've got my Fvwm tiling module working well enough, and so I no longer need to use XMonad.
Thanks for the feedback! -- Don
I dislike the interface for handling floating windows as well. I too often like to drink and manage floating windows... - jeremy
I also find it somewhat awkward and feel it breaks one of the primary tenents if xmonad which is that you should be able to do everything with the keyboard. Maybe it would be a good idea to provide some default bindings to allow floating window movement and resizing using the keyboard alone? Something like the way in windows and some other WMs where you can enter a moving or resizing mode and then use the arrow keys to adjust the window? On Jul 26, 2009, at 11:18 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy@n-heptane.com> wrote:
I dislike the interface for handling floating windows as well. I too often like to drink and manage floating windows...
- jeremy _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
Please find the 4 lines below the line '-- moving floating window with key' in my xmonad.hs; Its effect: 1. move window around using M-Arrows, 2. resize windows using C-Arrows, 3. Holding <Shift> to move/resize 2 pixels per step instead of 20 pixels. I've been using this configuration for quite a while and found its very convenient. -lars On Sun, 26 Jul 2009, Kyle Murphy wrote:
I also find it somewhat awkward and feel it breaks one of the primary tenents if xmonad which is that you should be able to do everything with the keyboard. Maybe it would be a good idea to provide some default bindings to allow floating window movement and resizing using the keyboard alone? Something like the way in windows and some other WMs where you can enter a moving or resizing mode and then use the arrow keys to adjust the window?
On Jul 26, 2009, at 11:18 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy@n-heptane.com> wrote:
I dislike the interface for handling floating windows as well. I too often like to drink and manage floating windows...
- jeremy _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
That does look like a nice setup. Maybe something like that should be included in the default config and the bindings listed on the guided tour page of the xmonad site? It does seem odd that in the default config every other action (including toggling floating status) can be accomplished using only the keyboard with the exceptions of resizing and moving floating windows. I'm relatively new to XMonad myself (I've been using it for a bit over a week) so it's possible there is a default binding for moving and resizing windows, but if there is it's not documented anywhere that a newbie would be expected to run across it and that strikes me as a problem. -Kyle On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:20 AM, Chengqi Song <songcq@gmail.com> wrote:
Please find the 4 lines below the line '-- moving floating window with key' in my xmonad.hs;
Its effect: 1. move window around using M-Arrows, 2. resize windows using C-Arrows, 3. Holding <Shift> to move/resize 2 pixels per step instead of 20 pixels.
I've been using this configuration for quite a while and found its very convenient.
-lars
On Sun, 26 Jul 2009, Kyle Murphy wrote:
I also find it somewhat awkward and feel it breaks one of the primary tenents if xmonad which is that you should be able to do everything with the keyboard. Maybe it would be a good idea to provide some default bindings to allow floating window movement and resizing using the keyboard alone? Something like the way in windows and some other WMs where you can enter a moving or resizing mode and then use the arrow keys to adjust the window?
On Jul 26, 2009, at 11:18 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy@n-heptane.com> wrote:
I dislike the interface for handling floating windows as well. I too often like to drink and manage floating windows...
- jeremy _______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
_______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad
participants (5)
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Chengqi Song -
Don Stewart -
Jeremy Shaw -
Kathryn Andersen -
Kyle Murphy