-- Re: [Xmonad] Changes in the dev branch: xmonad can now be configured without recompiling the src!

[Don Stewart]

mailing_list:
> On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 11:56:30AM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
> > Other documentation is likely to be out of date. If people have
> > suggestions on how best to migrate users from the old to the new
> > configuration system, I'd love to hear it. 
> 
> As a reminder, to myself primarily, I think this should be the next
> priority before the 0.5 release. At a first sight this seems not very
> simple.
> 
> Probably we should have some kind of a guidelines in order to have
> some kind of uniformity. Tomorrow I'll try to think a bit about it.
> And I join Don in asking for advice and suggestions.
> 

So the general rule is that your old config file goes into
~/.xmonad/xmoand.hs, you lift the top level bindings into a XConfig
structure, and set:

    main = xmonad myconf

where myconf is your XConfig structure.

Its actually a lot simpler to rewrite, just selectively updating
defaults you want to change. Leading to, e.g.:

    main = xmonad $ defaultConfig {
                            borderWith = 4
                        }

So to start this process off, we've got some 0.4 and 0.5 configs side by
side on the wiki.

    http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive 

Also nice, is now you can run arbitrary actions before xmonad runs, 
meaning all your .xinitrc and run-xmonad scripts can be moved into 
xmonad's config file. 

For example, no more dzen mucking around. You just:

    main = dzen xmonad

to run default xmonad with a dzen logging status bar.

Its all good. :)