4 ms·

I've been a xmonad user for a long time, but I'm going to switch to i3. While xmonad is nice, and haskell is nice, the haskell eco system is a PITA. And thing

by mseidl 12y ago

I've been a xmonad user for a long time, but I'm going to switch to i3. While xmonad is nice, and haskell is nice, the haskell eco system is a PITA. And things break a lot(using cabal). And somehow, after a long time of no changes my xmonad will no longer recompile. Trying to update the haskell stuff just turned out to be a HUGE pain. Also the libraries take up way too much space because you have to have then in different ways. I forgot how it went, but having xmonad(a small wm) required something like 1 to 1,5gb of harddrive space.

davidshepherd7 12y ago
Are you using a bleeding edge distro? I've been using the version of xmonad from apt-get in Ubuntu (usually the latest release) for ~3 years and it's never broken or required me to change my config.
- cantankerous 12y ago
  I'm using Arch linux and I've only managed to break XMonad once (or maybe twice) when I removed some packages that my config relied on. Admittedly my config file is probably pretty boring.
  - reycharles 12y ago
    For what it's worth my XMonad config broke at some point, so I'm running an executable from october 2013. I've tried fixing it, but too much is broken for it to be an easy fix right now.
diminish 12y ago
After 3 years with xmonad I ve moved to i3 which is as a minimalistic WM is itself small and lightweight.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Similar experience but with wmii. I wanted a tiling WM for a tiny hdd, tried wmii, MOD-Enter for term, MOD-<n> for workspace, a few ones to cycle through. Deal. It has some glitches, like MOD being swallowed somehow, maybe i3 doesn't have that. But so far I don't really miss XMonad. I do miss it because it's rock solid, it's Haskell, but wmii/i3 get you going in less than 1MB.
Devthrowaway80 12y ago
I've been considering switching to i3 for similar reasons (plus configuring xmonad in Haskell is a bit of a pain as I'm not great at it). The only thing that is keeping me from doing it is the fact that i3 seems to bind workspaces to screens - I often find myself wanting to bring a particular workspace up on my central monitor. Any i3 users want to pipe up and enlighten me on how I could go about configuring i3 so that I can switch to any workspace on a particular screen?
- ilconsigliere 12y ago
  I love i3. While I don't use this function, its easily done and can be bound to a key: http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_moving_containers_workspaces_to_randr_outputs http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_moving_containers_works...
LukeHoersten 12y ago
For your WM you probably want to use a precompiled binary form your distro. What you're trying is equivalent of trying to get the whole gcc stack and deps to build a c-based WM. Haskell isn't a dynamic language and doesn't require anything Haskell-specific to be installed on the target system to run a binary. If you really do want to compile your window manager from source, newer versions of cabal, the Haskell package manager, have something called sandboxes which basically remedy the problems you're talking about. I don't recommend compiling from source unless you know what you're doing though and if you're not using sandboxes, you probably don't.
- tome 12y ago
  Configuring XMonad requires you to recompile it.
- mseidl 12y ago
  I was using rpms until they broke multi-monitor support, then I switched to using cabal, which worked when I first installed it, but now it broke on it's own. And when trying to fix it several packages where broken again. For no reason. Cabal also doesn't do dependency management. So you have to try to install something, it'll complain it doesn't have X, then you have to install X, then it complains it doesn't have Y and so on.

by mseidl 12y ago

davidshepherd7 12y ago

Are you using a bleeding edge distro? I've been using the version of xmonad from apt-get in Ubuntu (usually the latest release) for ~3 years and it's never broken or required me to change my config.

cantankerous 12y ago
I'm using Arch linux and I've only managed to break XMonad once (or maybe twice) when I removed some packages that my config relied on. Admittedly my config file is probably pretty boring.
- reycharles 12y ago
  For what it's worth my XMonad config broke at some point, so I'm running an executable from october 2013. I've tried fixing it, but too much is broken for it to be an easy fix right now.

diminish 12y ago

After 3 years with xmonad I ve moved to i3 which is as a minimalistic WM is itself small and lightweight.

agumonkey 12y ago
Similar experience but with wmii. I wanted a tiling WM for a tiny hdd, tried wmii, MOD-Enter for term, MOD-<n> for workspace, a few ones to cycle through. Deal. It has some glitches, like MOD being swallowed somehow, maybe i3 doesn't have that. But so far I don't really miss XMonad. I do miss it because it's rock solid, it's Haskell, but wmii/i3 get you going in less than 1MB.

Devthrowaway80 12y ago

I've been considering switching to i3 for similar reasons (plus configuring xmonad in Haskell is a bit of a pain as I'm not great at it). The only thing that is keeping me from doing it is the fact that i3 seems to bind workspaces to screens - I often find myself wanting to bring a particular workspace up on my central monitor. Any i3 users want to pipe up and enlighten me on how I could go about configuring i3 so that I can switch to any workspace on a particular screen?

ilconsigliere 12y ago
I love i3. While I don't use this function, its easily done and can be bound to a key: http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_moving_containers_workspaces_to_randr_outputs http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_moving_containers_works...

LukeHoersten 12y ago

For your WM you probably want to use a precompiled binary form your distro. What you're trying is equivalent of trying to get the whole gcc stack and deps to build a c-based WM. Haskell isn't a dynamic language and doesn't require anything Haskell-specific to be installed on the target system to run a binary. If you really do want to compile your window manager from source, newer versions of cabal, the Haskell package manager, have something called sandboxes which basically remedy the problems you're talking about. I don't recommend compiling from source unless you know what you're doing though and if you're not using sandboxes, you probably don't.

tome 12y ago
Configuring XMonad requires you to recompile it.
mseidl 12y ago
I was using rpms until they broke multi-monitor support, then I switched to using cabal, which worked when I first installed it, but now it broke on it's own. And when trying to fix it several packages where broken again. For no reason. Cabal also doesn't do dependency management. So you have to try to install something, it'll complain it doesn't have X, then you have to install X, then it complains it doesn't have Y and so on.