[Xmonad] the future of xmonad...

[Andrea Rossato]

Hi,

I just wanted to stop by and say thanks for your great effort. 

I discovered XMonad a couple of days ago during an upgrade of my aging
system. I used to run Ion3, that is the expression of a given
philosophy regarding usability, and I'm planning to switch to XMonad
(I'm still in the progress of learning and customizing it, and it is
going to take some time, since I'm a bit lazy recently).

I've been impressed with your design decisions (Don, please keep on
blogging on that, you promised a lot in your first post, and I'll be
keeping an eye on you!). Reading your code is quite of a hell of a
learning experience for me.

I'd like to help, but I'm absolutely new to X Window programming -
and, yes, XMonad is quite an incentive to study. I thought about
making the source code haddock compatible (it could be useful for new
comers like me). Do you think that could be useful?

I'd like to add support for hs-plugins (I love and use a lot the lua
prompt in Ion3, and I've been dreaming about having an interactive
Haskell prompt in my WM), but unfortunately hs-plugins does not work
with ghc-6.6.1 (I've just upgraded and built a lot of knew exciting
libraries, and I do not want to downgrade back to ghc-6.4.2. Don,
could you help me with that? ;-). I'd like to start studying a tabbed
layout as soon as I'll have a better understanding of the code base.

I must confess that by reading the XMonad site though, I had the
slight impression that what you are actually trying do, your main
goal, is to prove that Haskell, and its tool chain, allows the rapid
development of the highest quality of code. This is not going to be a
problem, I'd like to see people attracted to Haskell because of the
possibility to write real world (I know, there's a book coming...:-),
useful applications. This is my own experience after all. 

But I'm watching for a different WM because the writer of my previous
one came to think that people who patch it are infringing its trade
mark, decided to change license and started threatening legal actions
against community web sites and to distribute the WM as proprietary
software...;-)

Thanks for your code. Really.
Ciao

Andrea