[xmonad] Re: Project to make tiling window managers more accessible to newcomers

[mail at justinbogner.com]

Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> writes:
> One idea I've always wondered about is a menubar based tiling WM. The
> user, say, middle-clicks (hardly anyone uses middle-click), and then a
> geometrical menu pops up along the lines of
> XMonad.Actions.GridSelect. In it are all the default operations -
> 'kill', 'refresh',  'sendMessage NextLayout', etc. The user
> left-clicks on one and voila.
>

If people don't use middle click, then how do they paste text in X11?
Other than that minor nitpick, this idea seems fairly interesting, I
sometimes want to be able to use my computer with only the mouse, rather
than only the keyboard.

<SNIP...>

> * In theory if you wanted to make a menubar that worked with arbitrary
> keymaps, you'd need some sort of Show equivalent for functions, since
> you need to be able to have a textual equivalent to whatever crazy
> things people may do - how could you really foresee my binding of
> 'runOrRaise "amarok" (className =? "amarokapp")'? - which gets you
> into complex territory fast. But if you're serious about the default
> config, you could just write up a static [String]. Which would also
> let you use more newbie-friendly names: instead of 'spawn
> "exe=`dmenu_path | dmenu` && eval \"exec $exe\""' you could just have
> 'run Dmenu'.

This is easily solved by having keybindings be a tuple of a name and a
function, the name being what you use for Show. Ideally, there'd be a
typeclass or something for functions so people can skip the names if
they don't use these features, and that would simply cripple this
particular UI.