[xmonad] Re: Turning emacs mini-buffer window into a strut

[mail at justinbogner.com]

John Yates <john at yates-sheets.org> writes:
> For reference my environment is Ubuntu Jaunty, Gnome with a single top
> panel on a 1920x1200 screen.  Under Gnome/Metacity I have
> emacs-snapshot (23.0.93.1) more or less working in the the single
> mini-buffer for all windows mode.  (Here I use the term window to
> refer to what in the Emacs world would be called a frame.)  The
> mini-buffer window is positioned at the bottom of the screen and is
> full-screen wide.  Alternatively I can position the mini-buffer at the
> top of the screen just below the Gnome panel.
>
> Now I want to move this Emacs arrangement to xmonad.  Because I have
> arranged for the mini-buffer window to have a distinct resource type I
> can recognize it in a manage hook.  From the xmonad FAQ and some
> googling I believe that when that window appears I need to set its
> override-redirect attribute to true and define it as a strut.  Though
> I am working my way through Hal Daumé's "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial"
> I fear it may be a while before I can code such a doStrut function.
> Thus my appeal to the readers of this list.  My sense is that when the
> mini-buffer window appears it is properly sized and positioned.  Thus
> there should be no need to compute the strut components, they should
> be directly liftable from the window.

You might have luck using the XMonad.Layout.Gaps layout in contrib, and
by having a managehook that ignores the emacs minibuffer window (using
doIgnore). This wouldn't be dynamic (moving the emacs window would
require you to reconfigure it), but could work as a kludge until you
manage to do it properly.