Updates: Status: WontFix Comment #2 on issue 191 by vogt.a...@gmail.com: Mirror makes hint-respecting layouts misbehave http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=191 A current workaround is to use XMonad.Layout.LayoutHints. While there might be some cases where: layoutHints (Tall ...) arranges windows with more (or badly placed) gaps than: HintedTile ... those issues should be fixed by making layoutHints smarter (which would be a separate feature request). The former allows "doing the right thing" with Mirror, provided you use this order: layoutHints (Mirror (Tall ...)) Doing the right thing in this case could be expressed with [1], but that's not really worth it (and that code doesn't work with ghc >= 7.2). [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/xmonad-extras/0.10/doc/html/XMon...