[Xmonad] the future of xmonad...

Spencer Janssen sjanssen at cse.unl.edu
Sat Jun 9 14:24:22 EDT 2007


On Sat, 9 Jun 2007 19:57:10 +0200
Andrea Rossato <mailing_list at istitutocolli.org> 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?

Yes!  We already comment most of our functions, it should just be a
matter of adding a | here and there.

> 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.

We don't plan to add any hs-plugins functionality at this time --
mainly for simplicity's sake.  Of course, if this is achievable in a
contrib module, go right ahead!

Tabs are another thing that don't belong in the core -- but we'd like to
make xmonad's layout system powerful enough to implement it as a
contrib module.  Please let us know when you stumble over limitations
of the layout system.


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen

> 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
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