[Xmonad] [HUMOR] xmonad useless without programming skills ?

[Spencer Janssen]

On Friday 14 September 2007 18:44:11 Alex Tarkovsky wrote:
> Don Stewart wrote:
> >> Runtime code modification is the only thing I admire about Smalltalk,
> >> and it's something I hope is practical in Haskell.
> >
> > Spencer has a possible architecture based on ghci, which would give us
> > zero-compile reloading, using just the bytecode interpreter.
>
> Good to hear. I'd be interested in using it in some of my own projects.
> Do you know if this will be a generic framework, or will it be tightly
> integrated into xmonad?

The idea is to package xmonad as a library, and install it just like any other
Haskell library.  The executable kept in /usr/bin/xmonad might be a shell
script that looks like:

    #!/bin/sh
    runghc $HOME/.xmonad/Main.hs

Of course the real script would have all sorts of error handling, executing a
default Main.hs if the user's Main.hs isn't available or valid.

Main.hs might look like:

    module Main where

    import XMonad.Main
    import XMonadContrib.MyFancyContrib -- etc.

    main = xmonadMainWith $ defaultOptions { keybindings = ..., etc. }

One could imagine:

    module Main where

    import Gtk
    import XMonad.Main

    main = do
        if config exists
            then parseConfig >>= xmonadMainWith
            else do fancyGtkDialog; parseConfig >>= xmonadMainWith

Just an idea we're kicking around.


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen