[Xmonad] the future of xmonad...

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 07:57:10PM +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote:
> 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?

It already is designed for haddock:

-- | manage. Add a new window to be managed in the current workspace.
-- Bring it into focus.
--
-- Whether the window is already managed, or not, it is mapped, has its
-- border set, and its event mask set.
--

Personally, I'd like to see xmonad turned into .lhs, triply commented,
and fed through lhs2TeX :)

> 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.

The darcs version of hs-plugins supports GHC 6.6.0, which as you might
surmise from the version number supports most of the same features.

> 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...;-)

Haha.  I switched from ion3 because it was too much work to keep the
panes in a sane configuration...

> Thanks for your code. Really.

Stefan