I've been experimenting with simple approaches to having an external statusbar for xmonad. One possible option is to use dzen, a console-based X statusbar client: http://gotmor.googlepages.com/dzen Using dzen, we can , for example, have a popup clock/system status shell script, like so: #!/bin/sh au=`date +"%H.%M %a %b %d"` uk=`TZ=GMT date +"UK %H.%M"` us=`TZ=America/New_York date +"NY %H.%M"` ca=`TZ=America/Los_Angeles date +"SF %H.%M"` hw=`/sbin/sysctl hw.setperf | sed "s/.*=//" | perl -anle 'print (0.6 + ($F[0]) / 100)'` ut=`uptime | sed 's/.*://; s/,//g'` bt=`/usr/sbin/apm | sed -n 's/.*: \([^ ]*\).*$/\1/;2p;4p' | xargs printf "apm %s%%, AC %s\n"` (printf "%s : %s : %s : %s : %s Ghz : %s :%s\n" "$au" "$uk" "$us" "$ca" "$hw" "$bt" "$ut"; sleep 10) | dzen2 So this just gathers some info from my system, then pipes a string into dzen2, and times it out after 10 seconds. We can then bind to this 'status' script from Config.hs: , ((modMask, xK_s ), spawn "/home/dons/bin/status") That is, mod-s pops up a 10 second status bar with the time, and some system info. Probably we can do some more fun things with dzen. Happy hacking, Don