Dear all, Thank you for your amazing replies. Until now I have managed to get XMonad.Layout.ShowWName running and it is already great help. What I would like, though, would be to make that small indication of what the current workspace is called *permanent* -- by having it sit, eg, in a corner of each of my screens. Looking at the source [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/src/XMonad-Layout-ShowWName.htm...], I understand that I can change the x and y arithmetic to position the small window displaying the workspace name in a corner of my screen. What I don't know how to do is: - to disable the "timer", so that it doesn't fade out; I guess it has to be done in the last two statements of that function? - how to recompile  XMonad.Layout.ShowWName so that this "custom" version runs rather than the one included in xmonad-contrib on my ubuntu system. Any guidance on how to pull this off would be amazing. : ) Many thanks, best, ~lara