* On Thursday, July 16 2009, Pär Andersson wrote:

Hi,

...

If I could somehow set nmaster to 1 when number of windows is less than 4 I guess that would do the trick.

First I thought of using a logHook to update the layout:

setNMaster :: X () setNMaster = do n <- gets $ length . W.integrate' . W.stack . W.workspace . W.current . windowset if n >= 4 then sendMessage (IncMasterN 1) else sendMessage (IncMasterN (-1))

But that would only work if we had a message to /set/ the nmaster, which we don't. And I'd expect there to be some infinite loops, since sendMessage will trigger another refresh, which will run the loghook again, and so on. A more messy option that should work is to define a layout in terms of Tall, which sets nmaster according to your specification:

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances, MultiParamTypeClasses #-} import XMonad import qualified XMonad.StackSet as W

data TallAlt a = TallAlt { tallAltIncrement :: !Rational, tallAltRatio :: !Rational } deriving (Read, Show)

instance LayoutClass TallAlt a where -- this would be more cleanly done with pureLayout, but Tall has no contract that it will remain pure doLayout (TallAlt i d) r st = fmap (\(x,_) -> (x,Nothing)) $ doLayout (Tall nmaster i d) r st where nmaster | stlen > 3 = 2 | otherwise = 1 stlen = length $ W.integrate st pureMessage (TallAlt i d) m = (`fmap` fromMessage m) $ \x -> case x of Expand -> TallAlt i (d+i) Shrink -> TallAlt i (d-i)

Which you can then use with something like:

myLayout = smartBorders (configurableNavigation noNavigateBorders $ (tiled) ||| Full) where tiled = TallAlt delta ratio ratio = 1/2 delta = 3/100

Note, I didn't test this, though it does typecheck. I think that you might be better served by layouts that take more freedom in laying windows out, such as Mosaic, MosaicAlt, or any Resizable* variants, however. Adam

Depending how adamant you are about the layout of higher numbers of windows, you might find Grid to be satisfying in some ways. ~d