daniel.schoepe:

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 07:53:46PM +0100, Amy de Buitléir wrote:

...

Hi,

This is a n00b question, so if there's a more appropriate place to ask it, please let me know.

This mailinglist and #xmonad on FreeNode are the right places for any xmonad questions. In my experience, the Haskell community in general is extremly welcoming to newbies, so don't be afraid to ask.

...

I installed Xmonad yesterday and am thrilled with the speed, simplicity, and how much control it gives me. I really want to try out GridSelect for switching between windows, but it's in a hidden package (which installed using cabal). I'm new to Haskell as well as to XMonad, so I'm having a little trouble figuring out how to deal with this. If I do...

You don't need bluetile for GridSelect, it just isn't included in the released version of xmonad(i.e. it didn't exist at that time). My suggestion is to remove bluetile(it might be possible to have both installed, since bluetile seems to be hidden though) and install the darcs version of xmonad and xmonad-contrib, which contains GridSelect. You can then use it just like any other module. See the "From darcs" section here: http://xmonad.org/download.html

Is the bluetile "branch" likely to be merged in? Is the developer on this mailing list? I'd seriously like to consider what it would take to merge it in, since otherwise I'm not sure what its future is. -- Don

Hi! On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 11:35:11PM +0200, Daniel Schoepe wrote:

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 01:06:51PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

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Is the bluetile "branch" likely to be merged in?

Is the developer on this mailing list? I'd seriously like to consider what it would take to merge it in, since otherwise I'm not sure what its future is.

Yes, he(Jan Vornberger) is(or at least was) on this mailinglist and talked about a school project to make xmonad more suitable for newbies[1] a few months ago. bluetile seems to be the result of his efforts.

Sorry about the silence. That's correct, I'm the author of Bluetile and it's the result of this school project. I meant to be announcing it on the list in a couple of days, after I put together a small website with some information. But I already uploaded it to Hackage and apparently it's already confusing users. Sorry about that! I tried to avoid any problems when xmonad and Bluetile are installed at the same time, that's why the bluetilebranch-stuff is hidden.

I haven't looked how much of the additions should be merged in, since the goals of the project seem to be somewhat different and might conflict sometimes, but I already saw that he added code to replace the currently running window manager, which is certainly useful.

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.xmonad/7458/focus=7499

After I'm done with the project, I definitely want to prepare a bunch of patches for consideration to be merged back. Some stuff can definitely be useful for xmonad as well, I think. The minimize-layout-modifier is kinda neat, I think, which allows to minimize windows in any layout. In the optimal case, everything should be possible to be merged back to xmonad. Bluetile could than depend on the 'vanilla' version of xmonad and xmonad-contrib. Bluetile, in a way, is just a newbie-friendly xmonad.hs. So even if some stuff isn't really of interest to xmonad users, it could just sit in contrib and only be used by Bluetile. Anyway, as I said, in a couple of days I will have a website with some more information ready. But if you would like to have a look already, you can get Bluetile from http://code.haskell.org/bluetile/ or by doing: $ cabal install bluetile $ cabal install bluetileutils then, preferably from a terminal running under GNOME + Metacity, just: $ bluetile Until the keybindings are documented, you will have to look at Bluetile's config (http://code.haskell.org/bluetile/bluetile/Config.hs) Best regards! Jan PS: I'm still on GHC 6.8, so I'm interested if there are any problems with GHC 6.10. And of course if there are any other things in general, that need fixing.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Amy de Buitléir wrote:

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You don't need bluetile for GridSelect, it just isn't included in the released version of xmonad(i.e. it didn't exist at that time). My suggestion is to remove bluetile(it might be possible to have both installed, since bluetile seems to be hidden though) and install the darcs version of xmonad and xmonad-contrib, which contains GridSelect. You can then use it just like any other module.  See the "From darcs" section here: http://xmonad.org/download.html

Thank you for the advice. Installation of the darcs version of Xmonad went fine, but I ran into a snag when I tried to install the darcs version of XMonadContrib:

darcs get http://code.haskell.org/XMonadContrib cd XMonadContrib/ runhaskell Setup.lhs configure

...after that last command, I got this message:

Configuring xmonad-contrib-0.8.1... Setup.lhs: At least the following dependencies are missing: utf8-string -any

So I did "cabal install utf8-string", which ran without errors. Then I retried "runhaskell Setup.lhs configure" and got the same error. Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance, Amy

This is usually fixed with 'configure --user'. -- gwern

* On Monday, August 31 2009, Daniel Schoepe wrote:

Instead of using Setup.lhs you could just run "cabal install" in the directory. That way xmonad-contrib will automatically be installed for your user only, like utf8-string. (It has the same effect as Gwern's suggestion of using --user).

And 'cabal install' it will automatically install any of the other dependencies you may have enabled (ex. X11-xft). -- Adam