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Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

xmonad.wordpress.com

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Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#31

Post by silentbicycle »

old-gregg wrote: post #30

I'm looking at it from a distance, trying to find some free time to play. A couple of questions: 1. They mention "Gnome compatibility" and "KDE compatibility" on their page. Why? I thought this window manager is supposed to be used instead of gnome/KDE, no? 2. On some screenshots you can clearly see overlapping windows, i.e. not all of them are always tiled? Thanks!

For point 2, you can set a given window (or the layout for the current screen) to floating, which is the only behavior available in many conventional WMs. Some programs (most notably, the gimp) are very annoying to use in a tiled layout, so this is an easy way to accommodate them. .

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#32

Post by tamas »

old-gregg wrote: post #30

I'm looking at it from a distance, trying to find some free time to play. A couple of questions: 1. They mention "Gnome compatibility" and "KDE compatibility" on their page. Why? I thought this window manager is supposed to be used instead of gnome/KDE, no? 2. On some screenshots you can clearly see overlapping windows, i.e. not all of them are always tiled? Thanks!

Gnome and KDE has their own window managers, namely Metacity and KWin. These can be replaced by other window managers, like Xmonad, and you can still use the Gnome/KDE infrastructure and utilities just as nicely.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#33

Post by LeChuck »

jrockway wrote: post #17
clicks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have lots of example configurations you can just copy. Sure, you can do that. But then you also have to take the time to understand THAT config (which, isn't even optimized for _YOU_, to begin with) and get USED to that . . . >I agree that at first it seems like it's going to be a huge hassle to setup but it's really not that bad after you've done it once. You also have to invest time in understanding how the…

Just pretend it's not configurable. Now it's like all the other window managers. Also, stop calling tiling window managers "twm". "twm" is a specific window manager that comes with X. (Now there's a hard-to-use window manager.) Finally, what problems were you having? If you just didn't like it, say so.

>Just pretend it's not configurable. Now it's like all the other window managers.

Currently my xmonad.hs looks like this:

  import XMonad
  import XMonad.Config.Gnome
 
  main = xmonad gnomeConfig
                { modMask = mod4Mask
                }
Works perfectly for me, no hassle required.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#34

Post by gwern »

old-gregg wrote: post #30

I'm looking at it from a distance, trying to find some free time to play. A couple of questions: 1. They mention "Gnome compatibility" and "KDE compatibility" on their page. Why? I thought this window manager is supposed to be used instead of gnome/KDE, no? 2. On some screenshots you can clearly see overlapping windows, i.e. not all of them are always tiled? Thanks!

> 1. They mention "Gnome compatibility" and "KDE compatibility" on their page. Why? I thought this window manager is supposed to be used instead of gnome/KDE, no?

You can do that if you want to, and most choose to. But there's good reason to not to:

I, for example, prefer not to spend a couple hours setting up dzen or xmobar in all their multifarious complexity & ability, getting the features right, setting up the colors to match my current GTK theme, etc. when I could just continue to use Gnome status-bar. (Gnome may have its issues, but I have no problem with the status bar.) Not to mention that running inside a Gnome session means you get a decent window manager, but also you get all the stuff Gnome usually does like printer support or device management. You could figure out how to do that independent of Gnome, but I don't consider that a good use of time.

> 2. On some screenshots you can clearly see overlapping windows, i.e. not all of them are always tiled?

You mean the floating layer? Windows are either tiled, or floating; floating is for things like Firefox dialogues which don't make sense to push into the tiled arrangement.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#35

Post by thenduks »

lupin_sansei wrote: post #18

Did you know that Windows 1.0 was a tiling window "manager"? Windows couldn't overlap for fear that Apple might sue Microsoft over the look and feel: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistorydesktop.mspx

It should be pointed out, however, that while Windows 1.0 might have been a tiling WM it doesn't come even vaguely close to the depth of features and attention to detail put into xmonad (and some of it's competitors).

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#36

Post by jrockway »

LeChuck wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just pretend it's not configurable. Now it's like all the other window managers. Also, stop calling tiling window managers "twm". "twm" is a specific window manager that comes with X. (Now there's a hard-to-use window manager.) Finally, what problems were you having? If you just didn't like it, say so.

>Just pretend it's not configurable. Now it's like all the other window managers. Currently my xmonad.hs looks like this: import XMonad import XMonad.Config.Gnome main = xmonad gnomeConfig { modMask = mod4Mask } Works perfectly for me, no hassle required.

Very clean config. You should share that with the Wiki if you haven't already. (Yeah, it's simple, but it seems many people don't think a simple configuration can be useful.)

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#37

Post by psadauskas »

jrockway wrote: post #21
warp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used ion or awesome? How is xmonad compared to those?

Awesome got its name from the sound you make when it crashes and takes your entire X session with it. "Awesome."

I've been using awesome for about a year now, and never had it crash. Xmonad, however, while never crashing, would cause my Xorg process to eventually use all available RAM after several days of use without restarting.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#38

Post by steveklabnik »

jrockway wrote: post #15
clicks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many kudos to dons for creating an awesome twm, but I don't think it's a good investment of time for the HN userbase (i.e., the young start-ups who just want to get their thing working and up, whatever be that 'thing'). Xmonad is hard to configure and set up, and hard to work with. I'd rather stick with gnome and have everything Just Work. But, that's just my opinion.

It's true. Eating is a waste of time, sleeping is a waste of time, interacting with other people is a waste of time, posting to HN is a waste of time, talking about things that are a waste of time is a waste of time, wasting time is a waste of time. Your startup is, statistically, probably a waste of time. But we do it anyway. I have spent a bit of time configuring Xmonad, but the configuration has lasted me for 2+ y…

Check out vimperator (though I guess you're an emacs kind of guy) to remove the mouse from even web browsing.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#39

Post by psadauskas »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #29
gurraman wrote: post #28

Xmonad is awesome. I run it (with urxvtd) inside X11.app as a terminal/iterm + tmux/screen replacement.

It's one of the reasons I'm switching back to Linux (from OS X) with my next computer purchase. Xmonad controlling my X-apps and the native OS X window manager controlling everything else is just unpleasant.

I'd be much more excited about getting a MBP if I could replace the window manager part of it with a tiling window manager, like can be done with gnome/kde.

Re: Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager

#40

Post by gurraman »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #29
gurraman wrote: post #28

Xmonad is awesome. I run it (with urxvtd) inside X11.app as a terminal/iterm + tmux/screen replacement.

It's one of the reasons I'm switching back to Linux (from OS X) with my next computer purchase. Xmonad controlling my X-apps and the native OS X window manager controlling everything else is just unpleasant.

Yes, I'd totally do that (at-least use my Linux partition) if a) the experience of running Linux on a MacBook was a little smoother (I've just bought a new one and I kind of like Apples hardware) and b) I wasn't dependent on PhotoShop et al.

My current setup works good enough for now though; I'm pretty much working in "modes"; stay pretty focused on isolated tasks (either designing stuff in PhotoShop and Illustrator, watching a movie or coding in vim and running tests in a terminal .. alas, I have to switch to a browser to check stuff every once in a while).

EDIT: Added a quotation mark.

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