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.

Zapping to strings and regexps

Here’re two functions which are similar to zap-to-char, but zap to a given string or regular expression.

(defun th-zap-to-string (arg str)
  "Same as `zap-to-char' except that it zaps to the given string
instead of a char."
  (interactive "p\\nsZap to string: ")
  (kill-region (point) (progn
                         (search-forward str nil nil arg)
                         (point))))

(defun th-zap-to-regexp (arg regexp)
  "Same as `zap-to-char' except that it zaps to the given regexp
instead of a char."
  (interactive "p\\nsZap to regexp: ")
  (kill-region (point) (progn
                         (re-search-forward regexp nil nil arg)
                         (point))))

Since I like zapping to strings and regexps more than zapping to chars, I bound them globally to M-z and M-Z, zap-to-char can be accessed with C-M-z.

(global-set-key (kbd "M-z")   'th-zap-to-string)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-Z")   'th-zap-to-regexp)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-z") 'zap-to-char)