Hi Alex, On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 09:17:45PM +0300, Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:

I'm trying to figure out how to put a dzen bar at the bottom of my screen with a date and battery indicator.

In principle, you can do this entirely within your xmonad.hs. But for mere mortals who don't find Haskell coding as easy as breathing, it's probably easier to do this from a shell script or similar (which you can either start from your xmonad.hs or from your .xsession or whatever). You can find my own dzen scrpits at: www.dr-qubit.org/download.php?file=code/scripts/dzen-status-bar www.dr-qubit.org/download.php?file=code/scripts/dzen-cal www.dr-qubit.org/download.php?file=code/scripts/dzen-weather www.dr-qubit.org/download.php?file=code/scripts/bbc-weather.awk The first is a general status bar with wifi, ethernet, battery, CPU frequency, temperature, email, weather, and date/time monitors (and probably others I've forgotten I wrote). The second displays the date/time with a drop-down calendar (this is just a modified version of a script from the dzen web site). The third displays a weather forecast from the BBC for your current location, with drop-down 5-day and 24-hour forecasts (it requires the awk script to work). They're not all that user-friendly. Configuration is done by editing variables at the top of the scripts, or by hacking the scripts themselves. YMMV.

Other questions I have: Assuming I have a separate chat workspace, could I have dzen flash that workspace when one of the windows wants attention? Or more generally, can have dzen or xmonad signal me when a window wants attention?

Check out urgency hooks (google Xmonad urgency hook). The documentation from the xmonad site should get you started (and is better than anything I could write).

Any advice in general for pidgin?

You need to enable and configure the Message Notification plugin.

Any advice in general for anything?

Just as with pidgin, for mutt, screen, urxvt and probably other apps, you may have to do a little config tweaking to get urgency hooks working.

I'm new to this, and it seems daunting, but I want to give it a chance. Thank you for any advice you have.

It's worth persevering. I've used many window managers over the years (KDE, enlightenment, later with a tiling add-on, compiz-fusion with the tiling module, ratpoison), but I'd never go back since discovering Xmonad. It *is* daunting, since the more you configure Xmonad the more you end up essentially implementing your own window manager in Haskell using Xmonad as a set of libraries. That said, it's not too difficult to get up and running quickly with a simple config, and slowly hone it to your needs over time. Having that power and flexibility allows amazing possibilities. I consider myself a novice Xmonad user, and an even worse Haskell coder, but I've managed to configure Xmonad to do almost exactly what I want. Good luck! Toby -- Dr T. S. Cubitt Quantum Information Theory group Department of Mathematics University of Bristol United Kingdom email: tsc25@cantab.net web: www.dr-qubit.org