[xmonad] Newbie: Problems with Layouts and Syntax

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* john spencer <mailinglists at speedpost.net> [2008-02-29 15:01:10+0100]
> Hi!
> 
> After having some contact with xmonad 0.4 (and dismissing it for some
> reasons) I thought it's time to have a look at it again. And ... wow!
> :-)) Maybe it's now time to change - if I can get some things right.
> 
> I'm currently a user of larswm; I configured it to have one large main
> (master) area and all the other windows of the current workspace
> stacked on the right site. With that configuration I am very fast
> selecting the window I want and making it the 'master'. I never work
> in one of the windows on the right site (you could also work in
> fullscreen mode -I hear you say- but for me its much more convenient
> to know in ONE look how many times I have to hit the 'next window' key
> than checking it every time I switch fullscreen); this means that
> these windows are never resized (just once when they are created at
> the main area).

So that's not a tiling layout, right? Could you provide a screenshot?

> Long speech - short sense: I need a fast possibility to select the
> window I am interested in. As I can see, I have several possibilities
> with xmonad:
> 
> 1. I could use the Hinted Tile Layout. As far as I understood, this
>    layout shouldn't resize the windows when they are put out of the
>    master. This would be the same configuration as I use currently
>    with larswm. The problem is, it doesn't work always. Some apps
>    (ie. aterm, konsole) seem to get resized which results in a nearly
>    blank window when getting them back to the master. I don't know why
>    the behaviour in larswm is different here - any ideas?
> 
> 2. I could use the Tabbed Layout. Unfortunately the tabs currently are
>    not giving me a really fast glue what is behind them. I have to
>    read the title of the tabs - thats not very fast. I can image that
>    some color-coding (ie. using regexps in the config) could improve
>    this significantly. Also -since working on the terminal means
>    looking at the bottom of the screen most of the time- putting the
>    tabs at the bottom instead of the top would also be a great
>    enhancement. What do you think?

This is quite simple. I don't know if it's already implemented, if not,
I'll do it in the evening.

> Are there any other options you can think of? Unfortunately I don't
> have any progamming skills w/ haskell. Which brings me to another
> problem: I'd like to map a key to execute two actions: I want to execute
> "windows W.focusDown" followed by a "windows W.swapMaster"; I have no
> idea how to specify this:
> 
> ((modMask .|. shiftMask, xK_Return), ... ??? ... -- windows W.focusDown
> && windows W.swapMaster

Use >> to sequence actions. E.g.
  windows W.focusDown >> windows W.swapMaster

-- 
Roman I. Cheplyaka (aka Feuerbach @ IRC)
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