XMonad does things just right
Two weeks ago I became aware of all the buzz about XMonad and so I tried it. With its default settings it’s pretty much like dwm, but there’s a XMonadContrib module that includes a whole bunch of additional layout algorithms which might be useful in one or the other situation.
XMonad is configured by editing a haskell source file named Config.hs and recompiling. It’s not like in lisp that you can edit the source and evaluate your changes without restart, but XMonad can be restarted with M-q without losing window or workspace informations.
The time I tried it out there was a xmonad-darcs ebuild in the gentoo-haskell overlay, but that didn’t have support for user configurations. Gentoo provides a mechanism for that, so extended the ebuild with that functionality. If you set USE=savedconfig for it, then the file /etc/portage/savedconfig/x11-wm/xmonad-darcs-0 will be used as Config.hs for compilation.
Another addition I made was that the ebuild fetches and uses the contrib modules if you set USE=extensions for it.
Both enhancements are now in the x11-wm/xmonad-darcs ebuild available in the gentoo-haskell overlay. (You can add the overlay with layman -a haskell and update it with layman -S, which will update all installed overlays. After that use the normal emerge command.)
My Config.hs can be gotten from my homepage, section Configs.
[...] Tassilo posted some more technical information about xmonad on his blog. Take a look if you’re interested in diving in yourself. Posted in xmonad, window managers, [...]
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