4 ms·

JJinuxLand: "xmonad exemplifies what I'd like to see more of in the Linux world"

22 points by dons 17y ago

furtivefelon 17y ago
I recently settled on XMonad as well for most of my development needs. i run it under VMware Fusion, with xmonad and some tweaks to run less non-essential background stuff, i manage to get by with just 128mb of ram dedicated to vmware (usually it hovers around 30% ram used). Firefox is run in mac, so that i will not be tempted to surf the web when in xmonad.
- mcav 17y ago
  What kinds of apps do you use in xmonad?
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    I use xmonad for everything, all the time.
- there 17y ago
  why can't you just run x11.app and xmonad on mac os? i use spaces on mac os and space 1 is a full-screen (but rootless) x11.app running ratpoison and two giant xterms. space 2 is a mostly full-screen firefox, space 3 is itunes, etc.
daeken 17y ago
I agree wholeheartedly, although I personally dislike xmonad. We need more experimentation; we need lots of people trying out random ideas. Most new ideas will fail, and even more implementations will fail, but the good ideas will slowly rise to the top. If we don't see more failures than successes, we're not stepping outside the comfort zone enough. So I present a challenge: take a common piece of software/functionality that you use and come up with a new approach. It doesn't have to be a good approach, but it has to be different. Implementations aren't necessary here, but they often help to turn a bad idea into a good one. For example, I don't believe much has been done with tabbed browsing in the past few years. It'd be nice to see a tiling window manager inside the browser, with tabs acting as a sort of taskbar. Would this idea work well? Doubtful, for most people at least. But who knows what idea might come from it if it was implemented?
- dons 17y ago
  > personally dislike xmonad Interesting. I believe that is the first time I've heard someone say that. Could you elaborate?
ehsanul 17y ago
XMonad is beyond hot, I recommend everyone to try it out. What I like best is never having to leave the keyboard to manage windows - talk about efficient window/workspace switching.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  Frankly, in the kind of environment where xmonad would be most useful (work), I have the least use for it. I simply don't fiddle with/change the windows my FreeBSD box at work. It does one thing: sit there with all the terminal/editor windows open. It doesn't need to anything else. For that matter, I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways that would take forever to set up with a floating layer in xmonad because I can't be bothered to learn the wm. I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising. I just don't have the need to move my windows around much. You know what I do need? A chromium package for FreeBSD. There's virtually no other web browser for *BSD/Linux that is tolerable.
  - dons 17y ago
    > I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising. More promising in what sense? > "I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways" I wonder if you could describe that workflow programmatically. Then you could automate it ... as a number of the xmonad layouts do.
mapleoin 17y ago
All of the things he mentions can be found in most of the popular window managers. I fail to see how xmonad is revolutionary in these ways.
- tumult 17y ago
  To me personally, the coolest thing about xmonad is that you can read the entire source in just a few minutes and understand it all as well. It's just a few hundred lines. You can then immediately start hacking on it.
  - gnosis 17y ago
    You can if you know Haskell. If you don't, good luck understanding it, much less hacking it. Don't get me wrong, I like xmonad, but not for the understandability/hackability of its source (which is opaque and unhackable for me, since I don't know Haskell). I used xmonad for about a year, but then got progressively more frustrated as my configuration file bloated out of control and got to the point where I risked breaking it if I made non-trivial changes without extensive hand-holding from people who knew Haskell. Eventually, I was faced with the choice: learn Haskell, or move to a window manager that used a simpler, actually understandable configuration file syntax. The choice was easy, as I did not have the time to learn a language as famously difficult as Haskell. So, I first moved to scrotwm and then (when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca. I've been exceedingly happy with my decision to switch. musca is not only much simpler to configure and understand than xmonad, but is also much faster and lighter. Check it out, if you like minimalist window managers.
    - dons 17y ago
      > but is also much faster and lighter I bet its not faster (xmonad uses primarily O(1) structures, such as zippers, for focus management). And 1000 lines of code. Window managers sleep 98% of the time -- I'm almost certain you can't observe computational overhead. > when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca That's the tension. Configurability needs a programming language. We chose Haskell since its high level and safe.
pavlov 17y ago
The author holds xmonad as an example of "trying bold, new ideas in user interface design". I'm not convinced that a tiling window manager qualifies, because the invention goes back some 30 years to Xerox PARC (where else). The Xerox Star shipped in 1981, and a major feature of its GUI was that simultaneously open application windows were automatically laid out so that they would not overlap.
soytea 17y ago
I've tried a couple tiling window managers (xmonad, awesome, dwm, and even ratpoison) but I always end up using tmux. It works on most unix operating systems so I can run it at work on OSX and at home on Ubuntu. I like having a dedicated workspace / virtual desktop to run tmux full screen in a terminal so it's there for when I need it. Oh and you don't even need to launch X to use tmux. It just seems much more convenient to me.
- pyre 17y ago
  > Oh and you don't even need to launch X to use tmux Right, but you're assuming that everyone that uses a tiling window manager does everything on a console.

22 points by dons 17y ago

I recently settled on XMonad as well for most of my development needs. i run it under VMware Fusion, with xmonad and some tweaks to run less non-essential background stuff, i manage to get by with just 128mb of ram dedicated to vmware (usually it hovers around 30% ram used). Firefox is run in mac, so that i will not be tempted to surf the web when in xmonad.

mcav 17y ago
What kinds of apps do you use in xmonad?
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  I use xmonad for everything, all the time.
there 17y ago
why can't you just run x11.app and xmonad on mac os? i use spaces on mac os and space 1 is a full-screen (but rootless) x11.app running ratpoison and two giant xterms. space 2 is a mostly full-screen firefox, space 3 is itunes, etc.

daeken 17y ago

I agree wholeheartedly, although I personally dislike xmonad. We need more experimentation; we need lots of people trying out random ideas. Most new ideas will fail, and even more implementations will fail, but the good ideas will slowly rise to the top. If we don't see more failures than successes, we're not stepping outside the comfort zone enough. So I present a challenge: take a common piece of software/functionality that you use and come up with a new approach. It doesn't have to be a good approach, but it has to be different. Implementations aren't necessary here, but they often help to turn a bad idea into a good one. For example, I don't believe much has been done with tabbed browsing in the past few years. It'd be nice to see a tiling window manager inside the browser, with tabs acting as a sort of taskbar. Would this idea work well? Doubtful, for most people at least. But who knows what idea might come from it if it was implemented?

dons 17y ago
> personally dislike xmonad Interesting. I believe that is the first time I've heard someone say that. Could you elaborate?

ehsanul 17y ago

XMonad is beyond hot, I recommend everyone to try it out. What I like best is never having to leave the keyboard to manage windows - talk about efficient window/workspace switching.

alnayyir 17y ago
Frankly, in the kind of environment where xmonad would be most useful (work), I have the least use for it. I simply don't fiddle with/change the windows my FreeBSD box at work. It does one thing: sit there with all the terminal/editor windows open. It doesn't need to anything else. For that matter, I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways that would take forever to set up with a floating layer in xmonad because I can't be bothered to learn the wm. I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising. I just don't have the need to move my windows around much. You know what I do need? A chromium package for FreeBSD. There's virtually no other web browser for *BSD/Linux that is tolerable.
- dons 17y ago
  > I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising. More promising in what sense? > "I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways" I wonder if you could describe that workflow programmatically. Then you could automate it ... as a number of the xmonad layouts do.

mapleoin 17y ago

All of the things he mentions can be found in most of the popular window managers. I fail to see how xmonad is revolutionary in these ways.

tumult 17y ago
To me personally, the coolest thing about xmonad is that you can read the entire source in just a few minutes and understand it all as well. It's just a few hundred lines. You can then immediately start hacking on it.
- gnosis 17y ago
  You can if you know Haskell. If you don't, good luck understanding it, much less hacking it. Don't get me wrong, I like xmonad, but not for the understandability/hackability of its source (which is opaque and unhackable for me, since I don't know Haskell). I used xmonad for about a year, but then got progressively more frustrated as my configuration file bloated out of control and got to the point where I risked breaking it if I made non-trivial changes without extensive hand-holding from people who knew Haskell. Eventually, I was faced with the choice: learn Haskell, or move to a window manager that used a simpler, actually understandable configuration file syntax. The choice was easy, as I did not have the time to learn a language as famously difficult as Haskell. So, I first moved to scrotwm and then (when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca. I've been exceedingly happy with my decision to switch. musca is not only much simpler to configure and understand than xmonad, but is also much faster and lighter. Check it out, if you like minimalist window managers.
  - dons 17y ago
    > but is also much faster and lighter I bet its not faster (xmonad uses primarily O(1) structures, such as zippers, for focus management). And 1000 lines of code. Window managers sleep 98% of the time -- I'm almost certain you can't observe computational overhead. > when I found scrotwm wasn't flexible enough) to musca That's the tension. Configurability needs a programming language. We chose Haskell since its high level and safe.

pavlov 17y ago

The author holds xmonad as an example of "trying bold, new ideas in user interface design". I'm not convinced that a tiling window manager qualifies, because the invention goes back some 30 years to Xerox PARC (where else). The Xerox Star shipped in 1981, and a major feature of its GUI was that simultaneously open application windows were automatically laid out so that they would not overlap.

soytea 17y ago

I've tried a couple tiling window managers (xmonad, awesome, dwm, and even ratpoison) but I always end up using tmux. It works on most unix operating systems so I can run it at work on OSX and at home on Ubuntu. I like having a dedicated workspace / virtual desktop to run tmux full screen in a terminal so it's there for when I need it. Oh and you don't even need to launch X to use tmux. It just seems much more convenient to me.

pyre 17y ago
> Oh and you don't even need to launch X to use tmux Right, but you're assuming that everyone that uses a tiling window manager does everything on a console.