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I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a

I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a starting point), but I wasn't able to get it to work. I've been thinking about trying to write something similar (a very small subset) of XMonad that will do the same style of tiled WM on top of cocoa, but I'm not sure where to start.

kasperbn 14y ago
Have you tried "Shift it" for OSX: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
danieldk 14y ago
I did use xmonad on OS X a lot, and I liked it. Since I live mostly in terminal emulators and vim, tiling for X11 applications was plenty enough. So, I ran X11 with xmonad fixed to a specific desktop (as OS X allows you to specify that an application should always run on a particular desktop). I used the other desktops for Cocoa applications (without tiling). Unfortunately, Lion switched to Mission Control, and I didn't revive that setup yet. It should be easy to do, since Lion now provides an option to prevent Mission Control to sort desktops by usage.
jerf 14y ago
For ten years, I'd used a series of window managers, but all in the same basic configuration, a non-tiling window manager with about 10 keyboard shortcuts I defined to move around a 2x2 set of virtual desktops copied from when Enlightenment first introduced me to the idea. I wanted to try XMonad after hearing people talk about it so much, but I figured with 10 years of having burned the same workflow into my fingers it would take me some time, so I sort of budgeted some playing-around time on my home computer of a few days before I even considered putting it on my work computer. It really surprised me that by the end of the first evening I was already pretty good with it and by the end of the second day didn't want to go back. I disagree that it's a big productivity enhancer, I think there's some excitement bias there, but even after a couple of days I did find myself preferring it, which was actually contrary to my expectations. It helps that I know Haskell well enough to truly understand the configuration file and configure it using Haskell qua Haskell, and not just copy-and-paste snippets from others (I also added some DBus support to manage volumes using Haskell DBus modules, though it's not tested enough to share), so I would say that if there's a tiling manager in a language you already know (Lua has one for instance, I think), you may want to try that one. I would also say this is not all that great a way to learn Haskell, the subset it uses for config is too small, and opaque if you don't already know what's going on. But tiling managers in general work better than I thought they would.

kasperbn 14y ago

Have you tried "Shift it" for OSX: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

danieldk 14y ago

I did use xmonad on OS X a lot, and I liked it. Since I live mostly in terminal emulators and vim, tiling for X11 applications was plenty enough. So, I ran X11 with xmonad fixed to a specific desktop (as OS X allows you to specify that an application should always run on a particular desktop). I used the other desktops for Cocoa applications (without tiling). Unfortunately, Lion switched to Mission Control, and I didn't revive that setup yet. It should be easy to do, since Lion now provides an option to prevent Mission Control to sort desktops by usage.

jerf 14y ago

For ten years, I'd used a series of window managers, but all in the same basic configuration, a non-tiling window manager with about 10 keyboard shortcuts I defined to move around a 2x2 set of virtual desktops copied from when Enlightenment first introduced me to the idea. I wanted to try XMonad after hearing people talk about it so much, but I figured with 10 years of having burned the same workflow into my fingers it would take me some time, so I sort of budgeted some playing-around time on my home computer of a few days before I even considered putting it on my work computer. It really surprised me that by the end of the first evening I was already pretty good with it and by the end of the second day didn't want to go back. I disagree that it's a big productivity enhancer, I think there's some excitement bias there, but even after a couple of days I did find myself preferring it, which was actually contrary to my expectations. It helps that I know Haskell well enough to truly understand the configuration file and configure it using Haskell qua Haskell, and not just copy-and-paste snippets from others (I also added some DBus support to manage volumes using Haskell DBus modules, though it's not tested enough to share), so I would say that if there's a tiling manager in a language you already know (Lua has one for instance, I think), you may want to try that one. I would also say this is not all that great a way to learn Haskell, the subset it uses for config is too small, and opaque if you don't already know what's going on. But tiling managers in general work better than I thought they would.