[xmonad] xmonad user survey!

[Timothy]

I'm responding in line:

> Hey all,
>
> xmonad's reaching a fairly stable place featurewise (and stability-wise
> too).
>
> Now is perhaps a good time to ask people what we can do to improve
> xmonad further.
>
>     * What things annoy you?
OK, it really really annoys me that programs can do XGrabKeyboard and xmonad 
does not work.  I have been in a multitude of situations in which firefox has 
crashed or frozen after having grabbed the keyboard and this has left me up 
the creak.  Sjansen claims there is nothing that can be done about this.  I 
really don't care, I want it fixed. 

It really annoys me when I accidentally tap the mouse with my thumb and a 
window goes floaty.

It really annoys me that kde apps' tray icons don't get picked up by kicker.

>     * What things do you like?
I love the automatic tiling(especially MosaicAlt) and the new xmonad.hs
I like  how in xmonad.hs I can redefine keys making it so I KNOW which hotkeys 
xmonad walks on, and if they interfear with a program of mine, I can change 
them.
I like the ability to have kde's kicker.
I like the responsiveness of the window manager.  
I like that with configuration it can take on an almost emacsish proprietary 
glove feel.
>     * What things can be done better?
Not xmonad, but in contrib the directional WindowNavigation doesn't wrap or 
work with layouts like Full and Roledex.

The Gaps don't have any kind of automatic layouting, it's all up to windows 
being over-ride redirect.  Sometimes they walk on eachother, or in my case(I 
have dzen and kicker) I had to do manual fiddling to get things arranged 
properly.
>     * What things are missing?
There is currently no way to have a sub workspace.  Like a tabbed browser I 
think of as a sub workspace in tabbed layout, so why can't I put a terminal 
in my tabbed browser.  If I was using the tabbing functionality of the window 
manager, I could. 

I would love to have a konfabulator or mac osx type widget thing.  I just find 
calculators, irc channels, and todo lists to be better as things that I 
popped up and pushed away, and then brought back with a press of a button.  I 
haven't yet figured out the whole todo list thing yet, but I think a text 
file that I could press a button and it would be floating focused above what 
I had been working but in such a way that what I had been working on was so 
visible(not knocked off the screen and out of my head) would be really 
helpfull, you ever walked into a room and thought to yourself "why did I come 
here", well I'm that way with workspaces sometimes.  

These are things that I plan to write myself that are missing:
1 Window bringer should be able to have a designated workspace that one would 
send windows to and then bring from, this workspace would become a kind of 
area for 'minimized' windows.

2 The mouse should jump to the center of a window when that window gets focus, 
this way the mouse would be in a logical window when you grabbed for it.  It 
would also allow the mouse to be used to spin through windows in my layout 
Roledex.
>     * What things do you     miss from ion/wmii/dwm/compiz
I really miss the ability in enlightenment to do windowkey-scroll wheal and 
have windows scaled up(not like be resized but like bitmap zooming)
I also miss from enlightenment the 2d grid of workspaces with the little icon.  
Somehow walking around a mini map of workspaces is really intuitive for me.
I miss window decorations sometimes, some apps don't provide usefull titles 
without them.  I might like decorations on a filter basis, like set which 
applications to decorate kind of like the current float list.
>     * What things do you not miss from ion/wmii/dwm/compiz ... :)
I don't miss fuddling with windows, nor do I miss mouse work.  I really like 
the ability to get on IRC and talk to real people who aren't total nubs.  I 
used to do things like go on #ubuntu and everyone would be obviously less 
intelligent then me,  and the entire weight of the world would fall on my 
shoulders and I would think to myself, "gosh I have to solve all the worlds 
problems because I'm the only one smart enough to do it".  Now I know I'm an 
idiot and I can let saving the world lie in the hands of geniuses like the 
one who prompted me for this survey.
>
> If you've any suggestions for things we can change to make xmonad better
> fit your workflow or whatever, please shout out!
>
> If you grumble when xmonad doesn't do something you think it should --
> let us know!
>
> With information like this we can continue to improve our progressive
> window manager :)
>
> -- Don
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