Xmonad 0.10 was released

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Notable_changes_since_0.9

by vially • 15 years ago

134 69 15 years ago

LBarret• 15 years ago

xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome.

I would like to have, on the official site, a list of distro, and for each, a tutorial that have been tested and works. Instead, one needs to hunt for blog post that are either incomplete or not applicable.

The latest Ubuntu upgrade was really a nightmare in this respect. had to mix xfce + xmonad but my setup is far from optimal...

exDM69• 15 years ago

>> xmonad is uber-wonderful but a good beginner documentation would be really awesome.

Why don't you write one? A lot of the xmonad (and other tiling wm) communities are battle scarred veterans who have been using dwm (the ancestor of xmonad, awesome et al) since day one and they don't need no stinking documentation :) And besides, one of the core ideas of dwm and (some of) it's successors is that the source code is the documentation.

So if you're a newb and would belong to the target group of the docs you're requesting, you're the perfect individual to write them.

I'm sure all the old timers on the IRC channel will be glad to help you to get started and will be even more delighted if you finish a doc.

aplusbi3• 15 years ago

Another one of the core ideas of dwm is "no noobs" which might explain the lack of documentation.

dons7• 15 years ago

xmonad is well documented:

* http://xmonad.org/documentation.html

E.g.

* http://xmonad.org/tour.html * http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Xmbindings.png

It was always intended to be the antithesis of dwm in terms of friendliness and accessibility.

gwern4• 15 years ago

I have heard good things in the past about beginners using Goerzen's tutorial: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Joh...

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Installation: After you've gotten ghci and cabal from your favourite package manager, just do:

> sudo cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib

Then you can get dmenu or dzen for a small menu and trayer for a small system tray.

Then use a premade config file from here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive and mess around with it.

To learn the keybindings, print this out or make it your wallpaper: http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/

For them ubuntu users, if oneiric broke a lot of things you can follow this: http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ That should allow you to select an xmonad session as opposed to a unity one during login.

As a general rule you can simply use xmonad as your window manager and just launch gnome-settings-daemon (or was it gnome-config-daemon?) to get all the theming, font antialiasing, etc. If you run nm-applet manually, that should launch the networking stuff (if it didn't already). I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that.

Edit: I use this one: https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config

It works great with multiple monitors, alt+w and alt+e move focus between monitors, and then I can swap which workspace is in which monitor really easily to move things around.

jamii• 15 years ago

> I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that.

Use XMonad.Config.Gnome.gnomeConfig as your base config. Log in with gnome as normal and do:

    pkill metacity
    pkill compiz
    sleep 3
    xmonad &

Not the most elegant solution, but it works.

pyre10• 15 years ago

That worked with Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how well that will work with Gnome 3 and/or Unity. Unity is pretty tied to Compiz (some portion of it is implemented as a Compiz plugin).

At this point, it's probably easier to either create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad (e.g. gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc) or to see about using XMonad as the window manager for XFCE.

Also, you used to be able to set the $WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable in ~/.gnomerc, to turn on XMonad as the window manager.

dfc2• 15 years ago

Can't you just select the session you want from gdm? Or did ubuntu take away that picker menu?

gwern4• 15 years ago

I don't think using 'sudo' is necessarily a good idea: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/611

mark_h• 15 years ago

The instructions from the wiki for Unity-2d integration also work fine: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Unity_...

That runs xmonad with the unity panel; it doesn't add the launcher, but I was never a fan of that to begin with (in part because its interaction with xmonad wasn't great, but I never spent much time trying to get it working properly either so it might be possible). The key difference is the wiki assumes you're installing from cabal, where-as Mark's assume an apt-get installation which already comes with a .desktop file.

Note that the wiki instructions mention the need to explicitly add gaps at the top, which Mark's instructions didn't. (Also, that the wiki config doesn't actually launch the launcher!)

foobarqux• 15 years ago

What is the correct way of starting exactly one instance of trayer if using gnome-session?

axk• 15 years ago

If you use Xmonad with GNOME 2/3 or Xfce, this panel applet/plugin can be handy: https://github.com/alexkay/xmonad-log-applet

(disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer)

daleharvey• 15 years ago

My macbook died recently and I switched back to ubuntu for the week, first thing I did was install xmonad, its a really awesome environment to work within.

I do wish it played nicer with other window environment, some applications just dont work inside a modal interface and when they dont I just want my normal windows with title bar and buttons back

I havent installed it on my mac now its repaired, the fact I dont be able to use my normal mac apps kinda put me off, but I may give it another shot, if there was a way to have xmonad like behaviour with mac applications while preserving floating windows I would be in heaven (divvy etc most certainly do not count)

Its probably worth mentioning that despite following several tutorials, getting xmonad installed on 11.04 was a nightmare that left plain ubuntu pretty broken, I would like to see that process improved as well

pyre10• 15 years ago

  >  just want my normal windows with title bar and
  > buttons back

There are contrib packages that allow you to add small title bars to the windows. You could configure XMonad with a 'floating' workspace, and enable title bars on all of the windows in that workspace. Then just setup rules to automatically send all of the programs that have issues to that workspace.

phillmv4• 15 years ago

I love how a "customizable tiling window manager" somehow requires the user to learn an unusual programming language and a dozen of inscrutable keyboard shortcuts.

It made my 24inch screen at the time far more manageable but it was supremely frustrating if I sometimes wanted a certain window to remain in a certain position without being disturbed.

davidcuddeback• 15 years ago

I just installed xmonad on 11.10 last week. It was very straightforward---didn't even need a tutorial. It's just "sudo apt-get install xmonad". The hard part was trying to customize xmonad without knowing Haskell.

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

Is there a compelling reason for somebody already using Awesome WM to look into Xmonad? Seems like I'm hearing about it more often these days.

daniel_solano• 15 years ago

I am an Xmonad user that tried Awesome, and the main thing that didn't work for me is that it seemed that Awesome workspaces (tags) were tied to particular monitors. Perhaps I just didn't take the time to figure out how to do it properly, but that was a deal-breaker for me.

In Xmonad, I have configured twenty different workspaces, and I can easily swap them in and out of any given monitor. With a triple-monitor configuration, this is quite handy.

dfc2• 15 years ago

That's what did it for me too. I'm sure there is a way in awesome to do it but its not as easy as xmonad.

Xmonad seems to not get in the way as much as awesome. For my purposes xmonad is just a lot simpler, but I am sure I am barely scratching the surface feature wise.

A lot of the awesome docs/screenshots reminded me of enlightenment-porn back when e17 seemed like vaporware. I don't need crazy graphs/apps/eye-candy just help me arrange organize my windows and go away.

pyre10• 15 years ago

Maybe Awesome is more stable now, but one of the reasons that I (and people I know) gave up on Awesome was how often the configuration interface changed, even once they switched it to Lua, the API would change between point releases.

If I upgrade from XMonad 0.9 => 0.10, I don't have to completely redo my config file, because a good portion of the API has changed.

raphinou• 15 years ago

Is there an official announcement somewhere? The Xmonad blog seems dead, and the twitter account is not in a better state. It's a pitty because it gives the impression that the project is not actively developed.

dons7• 15 years ago

There will be shortly. Sorry about the lack of noise online -- I switched jobs and cities, and haven't had time to do some of this kind of stuff. Adam Vogt has taken over as maintainer, and will be following up with an announce.

eschulte• 15 years ago

#xmonad on IRC is always populated with friendly and helpful xmonad cognoscenti

wunki• 15 years ago

I'm also using XMonad on Arch Linux. I found it hard to setup correctly, but once it is, it's a real productivity booster. Firing up another terminal (Meta-Shift-Enter) and not worrying about it's position is a time saver.

If you want to try it out, I can help you by reducing the time needed to set it up. My dotfiles are here: https://github.com/wunki/wunki-dotfiles

Best nuggets for your setup can be found in xmonad.hs, xinitrc and Xdefaults files.

dons7• 15 years ago

The underlying design invariant was that you should always be able to predict exactly what the screen would look like, before you perform an action. I'm glad that's the result we've achieved.

wyclif2• 15 years ago

Anybody have a link to some good screenshots of Xmonad 0.10?

dhs• 15 years ago

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots

dextorious3• 15 years ago

I'll go tell my coworker. He's the one industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.

dextorious3• 15 years ago

Looks like someone missed the reference:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...

ottbot• 15 years ago

Providing a reference for your joke doesn't really change much. I don't think you were downvoted because anyone thought your comment need citations, or because they weren't sure if it was actually supposed to be a joke.

Perhaps it was just a bit trite, and/or irrelevant.

moe2• 15 years ago

I'm still sad that ion3 is getting so little love these days.

It's easily the most advanced of the tiling wm crop, and by a long shot. Just some bullets:

- Floating/tiled can co-exist on same workspace (just attach/detach as needed), can also trivially set filters to have e.g. all dialogs and "all gimp-windows" float automatically.

- The tabbed frames metaphor is infinitely superior to the "one window per frame" metaphor that everyone else is stuck with.

- All configuration and extension is lua. It's an absolute joy to work with.

- Mouse works as expected. Just drag frames to resize the grid, drag titlebars to move windows into other frames, etc.

Up to this day I don't understand how people put up with the obscure limitations of the other tiling wm's (foremost: the one window per frame constraint, forced set of layouts that never work quite right, etc. etc.)...

dons7• 15 years ago

Most of the above list is actually supported by xmonad (and dwm, and awesome and ...). The two things that are really the defining characteristic of ion3 is that it is a user-defined layout (not a "dynamic" layout, a la xmonad), and that the clients are represented as a tree of windows, rather than e.g. a zipper or list of windows (which is how the nesting works).

xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient, and you can be more productive with predictable, automated tiling. They directly opposed ion3 in that regard.

Mouse, configuration, floating etc is all fairly standard everywhere.

moe2• 15 years ago

xmonad and its cohort basically make the proposition that user-defined layouts are inefficient

Well, having worked with both I strongly disagree with that assumption.

Of course it's all a matter of preference but I believe there's a lot of "you don't know what you're missing when you never had it" going on. I've yet to observe an awesome|wmii|xmonad user who doesn't constantly get into fights with the WM because they can't just quickly resize or re-order a few frames in a truly predictable way.

pyre10• 15 years ago

I thought one of the reasons that people didn't like ion3 was because the developer was really unpleasant.

gwern4• 15 years ago

No kidding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_%28window_manager%29#Contr...

(In #xmonad, we have chortled a time or two about the self-destructiveness which has sent so many Ion users to Xmonad.)

user911302966• 15 years ago

Every single time I see news about window managers, I'm surprised that i3 (i3wm.org) isn't mentioned. i3 is the supreme tiling window manager. It's mature, fast, feature-ful and it's BSD-licensed. This looks like an advert, but I'm just a pleased user that's been on the i3 train since 2009.

MostAwesomeDude• 15 years ago

The author's a tool and isn't interested in the community. Consequently, the community isn't interested in putting up with him.

pilooch• 15 years ago

been using xmonad for a couple of years. config is so minimal that it makes it vey simple to replicate the exact same environment on all my machines (laptops and desktops), with no ties to the underlying linux distribution.

postit• 15 years ago

I wish I could replace my osx window manager by xmonad =_)

jafour1• 15 years ago

Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast.

It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but is crippled by not being written in C.

Xmonad 0.10 was released

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