[xmonad] Help with achieving desired layout

[Bryan Huh]

Thanks Brandon. The second solution is really close to what I wanted. 
The first one is also close except when I switch to master I lose my 
spot in the slave stack, which is similar to the behavior for DragPane. 
The second solution doesn't have this problem when I switch to the 
master window, but it's not possible for me to switch back to my 
previously focused slave window without using my mouse.

I'm a little confused with what the Combo layout is supposed to do 
exactly. There actually isn't a clear sense of two different layouts, 
because no matter what, one pane ends up occupied with exactly one 
window, and only the other pane has one of the specified layouts. It's 
also not possible for me to move a window from one pane to the other, 
despite using the WindowNavigation as instructed in 
http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Combo.html. I 
can't tell whether Combo.hs is no longer working as it should or if I'm 
doing something wrong.

Bryan

On 01/12/2013 02:06 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Bryan Huh <bhh1988 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm using "Mirror Tall" with dual monitors. The top half of my screens are
>> for master windows, and the bottom half are for slave windows. I find
>> though, that as long as I have more than one slave window in a workspace it
>> makes the bottom half of the screen pretty unusable because it gets split
>> evenly amongst all the slaves, and each slave window becomes unpleasant to
>> view. It'd be nice if there was a main slave so that most or all of the
>> "slave pane" is filled with the main slave window. Then I would have half
>> of the screen filled with the master
>
> Perhaps what you want to do is wrap
> http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Master.htmlaround
> something like
> http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Grid.html .  (I
> don't think it will play well with a layout that already has a master
> window.)
>
> Alternately you could use
> http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Combo.html with
> something like
> http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Simplest.html in
> one pane and Tall or Mirror Tall in the other.  See the documentation for
> Combo for how you select and move windows with that setup.
>