[xmonad] The future of PerWorkspace

[Brent Yorgey]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Nicolas Pouillard <
nicolas.pouillard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Excerpts from Brent Yorgey's message of Fri Feb 01 22:53:20 +0100 2008:
> > On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Spencer Janssen <sjanssen at cse.unl.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 07:29:58PM -0500, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> > > >   1. PerWorkspace is an inelegant hack with several icky problems:
> > >
> > > Agreed.  It is approaching the limits of xmonad's layout design.
>  However,
> > > I
> > > think we can accomplish PerWorkspace behavior without changing too
> much.
> > >
> > > \begin{code}
> > > data PerWS = PerWS { selected :: Maybe Layout
> > >                   , choices  :: Map WorkspaceId Layout
> > >                   , default  :: Layout }
> > > \end{code}
> > >
> >
> > So, I took a crack at implementing (something like) this today.  The
> problem
> > I ran into is that (Layout a) is not an instance of Read, so
> PerWorkspace
> > cannot derive Read either.  Is there any way around this?  Or do I have
> to
> > go back to caching a (Maybe Bool) and using that to decide on which of
> two
> > layouts to use, instead of directly caching a (Maybe (Layout a))?
> >
> > Ideas?
>
> What about "instance Read a => Read (Layout a)"?
>

Well, since Layout is an existential wrapper, that's not possible -- it
hides the type of the wrapped layout.  I know that lots of work has already
gone into the xmonad core getting around this issue. =)

Hmm, just thinking out loud here... note that I don't actually care about
being able to read the (Layout a) value back in, since after
serialization/restart the startupHook will get run again anyway, and the
correct workspace will get re-cached.  So perhaps I can just write my own
explicit Read instance for PerWorkspace that somehow ignores that element
and just initializes the read value to Nothing.  Sounds scary. =)

-Brent
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