On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 03:21:26AM -0500, Spencer Janssen wrote:

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I'm tabling this one for now, because: - xmonad is in a feature freeze until 0.1 (coming soon) - it warrants a good discussion about the aim of xmonad (features, minimalism, etc).

Agreed. Hopefully we (you?) can come up with a minimal core

David Roundy writes: that is

nevertheless sufficiently extensible that a suitable Config.hs file can do anything a reasonable person would want. -- David Roundy

Yes, definitely. I think the best idea would be to have that stable extensible core, and let people swap around variants of Config.hs, perhaps including the better ones in the repository. ie, you could have a Ratpoison-style Config.hs, an Ion style Config.hs, etc. I think the editor yi does something similar with different keymap personalities for the emacsers & vimers among us. The question is, what's left to add? Right now, the biggest lack which I can identify in Xmonad as compared to my old Ratpoison/Stumpwm setup is the lack of any sort of status bar or display area where I can dump the output of 'top -n 1' or 'uptime' an' so on. Input seems handle-able by dmenu (despite a bad habit of changing apostrophes to backticks) and similar programs so output is the problem. (Although, I'm not entirely pleased with Config.hs since it keeps changing and inducing conflicts, but I suppose that's what I get for changing a lot of defaults and adding stuff.) -- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.

droundy:

On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 02:25:52PM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:

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[...] The question is, what's left to add? Right now, the biggest lack which I can identify in Xmonad as compared to my old Ratpoison/Stumpwm setup is the lack of any sort of status bar or display area where I can dump the output of 'top -n 1' or 'uptime' an' so on. Input seems handle-able by dmenu (despite a bad habit of changing apostrophes to backticks) and similar programs so output is the problem.

Well, for me the ability to customize the tile layout is pretty high in priority, as are tabs. Of course, you may say it's my fault for

Right. I'd hope , as I've said earlier, we could do all this via contributed Config.hs files. Leaving the core xmonad as a dwm-like system. but with arbitrary functionality via extra modules.

considering switching to a window manager modelled after one that I dislike, but there it is.

After that, I'd be interested in a decent input prompt (which dmenu is not). Ion's is better, but I'd rather figure out how to make use of an actual bash shell, as the tab completion of ion's query box is annoying (but better than nothing).

Does anyone know of a 3rd party tool for this? Like dmenu , but for more complex input? Also, does dzen get us anywhere towards this?

I guess with those changes (which I understand are pretty huge), xmonad would have pretty much caught up with ion3 in functionality that I care about. Oh, and the ability to customize treatment of windows. I don't want xclock to ever get the focus, for instance, and would prefer if I could stick the stupid korgac control panel application somewhere where it'll never be seen, and at a minimum to avoid giving it focus.

Not obvious how to do that yet. -- Don

On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 08:39:55PM -0400, Alec Berryman wrote:

Donald Bruce Stewart on 2007-04-16 09:13:31 +1000:

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droundy:

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After that, I'd be interested in a decent input prompt (which dmenu is not). Ion's is better, but I'd rather figure out how to make use of an actual bash shell, as the tab completion of ion's query box is annoying (but better than nothing).

Does anyone know of a 3rd party tool for this? Like dmenu , but for more complex input?

gmrun includes tab-completion, handles URLs, and can open specified programs in a shell.

Ah yes, that looks much nicer! The only catch is that it doesn't do tab-completion on arguments to the program... or rather, it does do tab-completion, but assumes the only arguments will be other programs. It suffers from the same problem ion's query menu does, which is that it tries to reinvent the wheel (which is to say, tab completion). Still, it's close to as good as ion3's query menu, which itself is good enough that I haven't yet gotten around to replacing it (although it annoys me almost every time I use it), so I suppose for now it'll do. -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University

droundy:

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 09:08:42AM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

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droundy:

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Hi all,

Here's a feature I've added (on my quest to make xmonad non-minimal...) to my version of xmonad. It's pretty crude, but I think some sort of "rotating" is in order. This way if I have only three workspaces with anything in them, I don't have to remember their numbers, and don't have to search through all nine options.

David

Sat Apr 14 22:56:16 PDT 2007 David Roundy * fix typo.

Sat Apr 14 23:30:34 PDT 2007 David Roundy * add code to rotate through non-empty workspaces. I don't expect that this will actually be accepted, as my code's pretty ugly, but it's a feature I want, and might inspire some ideas.

Ok. Yes, this is interesting.

Is it possible to have all this code in your own Config.hs? Being able to write rotView et al in Config.hs will give us an indication of how easy it is to just let people hack their own Config.hs (and other 3rd party modules), for extensions, without needing to patch the core.

Yes, of course. Anything that doesn't modify XMonad or Main can be done in Config, since Operations and StackSet both have no export lists. I assumed that export lists were intended to be added, and that's why I put code that seemed "Operations-level" in Operations and "StackSet-level" in StackSet.

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Basically I see Operations.hs as a default set of wm operations, but I can imagine people writing their own modules for other functionality, which people can import into their Config.hs.

I see. That's fine. I do think there should be an export list for StackSet, though, so you can change the internal structure in the future.

Yes, that's a good idea. We can just fix the API now, if we're going to treat the core xmonad as a library. -- Don