[xmonad] Re: Default settings: Prompt.hs's defaultXPConfig

[mail at justinbogner.com]

"Gwern Branwen" <gwern0 at gmail.com> writes:

> So, in my never-ending quest to have as short and concise an xmonad.hs
> as possible, I've turned my attention to my 'greenXPConfig'. This
> definition is eating up a gargantuan 10 lines of my xmonad.hs!
>
> Thus, I'm wondering about people's use of 'defaultXPConfig'; from Prompt.hs:
>
> defaultXPConfig :: XPConfig
> defaultXPConfig =
>     XPC { font              = "-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
>         , bgColor           = "#333333"
>         , fgColor           = "#FFFFFF"
>         , fgHLight          = "#000000"
>         , bgHLight          = "#BBBBBB"
>         , borderColor       = "#FFFFFF"
>         , promptBorderWidth = 1
>         , position          = Bottom
>         , height            = 18
>         , historySize       = 256
>         , historyFilter     = id
>         , defaultText       = []
>         , autoComplete      = Nothing
>         , showCompletionOnTab = False
>         }
>
> According to my xmonad archive, 15 configurations make use of the
> default in some way. My question is: are these defaults really
> optimal?
>
> I'll take them in order.
>
> 1) The font strikes me as a bad setting. I checked it out just now,
> and my eyes water at the tininess of 10. It seems to me that a far
> more reasonable setting would be something like 14 or 16; but I don't
> know whether a 16 setting would be alright for EE users. I feel though
> that 10 works out for no one.

10 seems perfect for me on a 1440x900 display with a font resolution of
about 100dpi. 14 or 16 are way too big here. Font size is tricky,
because it depends so much on resolution. OTOH, I use an xft font
anyway, which wouldn't be a good default, so I'm not too concerned with
what the default is.

> 2) The color scheme is currently a sort of white-on-grey. It lacks
> contrast, IMO. Here I have 2 suggestions:
> 2.1) The current color values are pretty opaque. Unless you have
> color-values memorized, ', bgColor           = "#333333"' is
> absolutely meaningless to you. Intrigeri's xmonad.hs has a XPConfig
> which looks like:
>      fgColor     = "grey80"
>     , bgColor     = "grey22"
>     , borderColor = "grey22"
>
> The prompt appears much the same, but the values are far more
> comprehensible. Even if we don't change the color scheme, this would
> constitute a code cleanup IMO.
> 2.2) I would like to switch to either green text on black (which gets
> us bonus hacker points :) and better contrast), or white text on black
> - as opposed to white text on gray. Thoughts on either color scheme?
> (Green-on-black would be , bgColor     = "black"\n, fgColor     =
> "green" obviously.)

I happen to like these colors (they're surprisingly close to the ones I
use for xterms, where I like a low contrast white on black), though I
think simply having white on black is probably a saner default.

> 3) Do people actually like the border? 5 xmonad.hss specifically
> disable it by setting 'promptBorderWidth = 0'. I confess it just seems
> like wasted space to me. It's not like a dark-gray/green/black
> background make it hard to make out the prompt against the application
> window.

I leave the border on, otherwise it's difficult to read when I'm on a
workspace with mostly terminals.

> 4) Positioning: top, or bottom? I myself am weakly in favor of top.
> The configs are odd here - there are ~4 which set to Top, and 5 or so
> which set it to Bottom. Even though Bottom is the default.
> 4 configurations override the config to put the box at the top of the
> screen. ???

I expect this is close to fifty-fifty in practice, so either default is
just as good as the other. Personally, I like top.