[Xmonad] xmobar-0.6 "The Existentialist" released!

[Andrea Rossato]

Hi!

I've just released xmobar-0.6 "The Existentialist", my status bar for
XMonad.

Grab the source here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/xmobar-0.6

Screen shot:
http://gorgias.mine.nu/xmobar/xmobar-0.6.png

If you cannot wait for ghc to do his job, here you can find a binary
with 2 sample configuration files:
http://gorgias.mine.nu/xmobar/

About this release:

1. Plugin support. I've already sent a mail regarding the way through
   which I decided to add plugin support,[1] so I'm not giving details
   here.
   There is an example within the distribution: Plugins/HelloWorld.hs
   See below (or the README) for instruction on how to install it. The
   precompiled binary linked above was compiled with it. In the README
   there are instructions on how to write plugins (should be very
   easy, I hope at least);

2. new way of configuring commands (resulting from the above change):
   I hope that makes it easier to configure XMobar: no more tuples but
   a single command prefixed by "Run". See the configuration samples
   and instruction in the README;

3. colors are off by default now, and you need to configure them
   explicitly. See the config sample or the README to find out how.

4. Performance: I did quite some profiling. The most resource
   consuming part was the network monitor. So I rewrote it. Now XMobar
   should be quite optimized. Test and report back please. There's
   room for more optimization I think, but the results so far seem
   good to me.

Hope you'll enjoy.
All the best,
Andrea

[1] My previous mail about existential plugin-ing:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-July/001413.html

To install the HelloWorld plugin:

1. import the plugin module in Config.hs, by adding: 
   
import Plugins.HelloWorld

2. add the plugin data type to the list of data types in the type
signature of "runnableTypes" in Config.hs. For instance, for the
HelloWorld plugin, change "runnableTypes" into:

runnableTypes :: (Command,(HelloWorld,()))
runnableTypes = undefined

3. Rebuild and reinstall XMobar. Now test it with:

xmobar Plugins/helloworld.config

As you may see in the example configuration file, the plugin can be
used by adding, in the "commands" list:

Run HelloWorld

and, in the output template, the alias of the plugin:

%helloWorld%

That's it.