[xmonad] Layout.LayoutCombinators? (Was: Re: Defining Layouts)

[Thomas Adam]

Hello all --

(Replying to myself might be considered bad form, but...)

On 16/12/2007, Thomas Adam <thomas.adam22 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Maybe this is already possible through some combination of existing
> extensions, I'm not sure so I thought I would ask anyway.
>
> I'm not using anything fancy at the moment, just the usual layouts
> defined like this:
>
>  , layoutHook = configurableNavigation (navigateColor "#00aa00") $
>                          toggleLayouts (noBorders Full) $
>                          (smartBorders (tiled ||| Mirror tiled ||| Full))
>
> Sometimes, when I am working in tiled mode, I might have a layout such as this:
>
> +------------+-------------+
> | window A |                 |
> +------------+Window D|
> | window B |                 |
> +------------+-------------+
> | window C |Window E |
> +------------+-------------+
>
> Where windows A,B and C are in the master pane.   Is it possible to
> make window D in this example fill the entire right hand side (to
> effectively "cover" window E) and then to toggle it back afterwards?
> There are times where there might be many more windows in the
> non-master pane and having one window fill the entire space would be
> useful.

So I dug about a bit and had a look at:

XMonad.Layout.LayoutCombinators

Is this something I could conceivably use to achieve the above?  I
tried the example config supplied in the documentation but I confess I
have no idea quite what all the weird idiomatic operators this hook
defines actually means.

Also, in using the example from its documentation, I noticed that none
of my key-bindings worked anymore.  I could still use the defaults
though.  Switching back to my old layout solved this, so this *has* to
be a bug with LayoutCombinators.

-- Thomas Adam