[Xmonad] Agaginst LayoutModifiers for hooks

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:51:35PM -0400, Devin Mullins wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 05:06:41PM +0200, Andrea Rossato wrote:
> > I do have an opinion on the subject... <snip opinion>
> 
> What Andrea said. I was thinking about some of the annoying hacks I had
> to do for UrgencyHook, and being able to configure a list of hooks that
> could be wired to listen on any event(s) would make the requirement for
> a new top level binding in Config.hs go away, and hence not require the
> user to mess with Config.hs-boot.

This, however, is orthogonal to Joachim's proposal.  His proposal could
reduce the pain for users of adding more hooks, but wouldn't reduce the
danger of an over-complex API, which I think is our primary concern.  But I
agree, event hooks should go in.  The question is in what form.  e.g. we
may find that reasonable uses of event hooks require the ability to store
state, as layouts do.  It'd be a shame to add a hook in a form that
required non-trivial event-hooks to be implemented as layout modifiers
after all.  e.g. what if we want a hook that binds a key an event to focus
the most-recently-urgent window.  This is reasonably easily implemented as
a layout modifier, but would require the use of unsafePerformIO to
construct a global variable when implemented with Joachim's proposed
hooks.  Or perhaps using the X server to store the global variable (as the
tags extension does)... but I'm not convinced that the X server is the best
location for global variables.  Maybe it is.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University