[xmonad] Question about using things in xmonad-contrib-bluetilebranch-0.8.1.2

[Jan Vornberger]

Hi!

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 11:35:11PM +0200, Daniel Schoepe wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 01:06:51PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
> > Is the bluetile "branch" likely to be merged in?
> > 
> > Is the developer on this mailing list? I'd seriously like to consider
> > what it would take to merge it in, since otherwise I'm not sure what its
> > future is.
> 
> Yes, he(Jan Vornberger) is(or at least was) on this mailinglist and talked about a
> school project to make xmonad more suitable for newbies[1] a few months
> ago. bluetile seems to be the result of his efforts. 

Sorry about the silence. That's correct, I'm the author of Bluetile and
it's the result of this school project. I meant to be announcing it on
the list in a couple of days, after I put together a small website with
some information.

But I already uploaded it to Hackage and apparently it's already
confusing users. Sorry about that! I tried to avoid any problems when
xmonad and Bluetile are installed at the same time, that's why the
bluetilebranch-stuff is hidden.

> 
> I haven't looked how much of the additions should be merged in, since
> the goals of the project seem to be somewhat different and might
> conflict sometimes, but I already saw that he added code to replace
> the currently running window manager, which is certainly useful.
> 
> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.xmonad/7458/focus=7499

After I'm done with the project, I definitely want to prepare a bunch of
patches for consideration to be merged back. Some stuff can definitely
be useful for xmonad as well, I think. The minimize-layout-modifier is
kinda neat, I think, which allows to minimize windows in any layout.
In the optimal case, everything should be possible to be merged back to
xmonad. Bluetile could than depend on the 'vanilla' version of xmonad
and xmonad-contrib.

Bluetile, in a way, is just a newbie-friendly xmonad.hs. So even if some
stuff isn't really of interest to xmonad users, it could just sit in
contrib and only be used by Bluetile.

Anyway, as I said, in a couple of days I will have a website with some
more information ready. But if you would like to have a look already,
you can get Bluetile from http://code.haskell.org/bluetile/ or by doing:

  $ cabal install bluetile
  $ cabal install bluetileutils
  then, preferably from a terminal running under GNOME + Metacity, just:
  $ bluetile

Until the keybindings are documented, you will have to look at
Bluetile's config (http://code.haskell.org/bluetile/bluetile/Config.hs)

Best regards!

Jan

PS: I'm still on GHC 6.8, so I'm interested if there are any problems
    with GHC 6.10. And of course if there are any other things in
    general, that need fixing.