3 ms·

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.
    - gnosis 17y ago
      Well, whether or not it's actually faster, it sure feels orders of magnitude faster. xmonad may use only 1000 lines of code for the window manager itself, but that's backed up by a rather large Haskell library (particularly when loading lots of contributed code). I know the resident memory size of xmonad is gigantic compared to musca. Manipulation of those large memory structures may be relatively slow, even if you use efficient algorithms (particularly on systems like my own, which use so much memory that some of my apps are swapped out). As for Haskell being high level and safe, I appreciate that. But it really does me little good when I don't know Haskell. The musca window manager doesn't require knowing Haskell, and I think it's just as flexible, and certainly high level enough (you can use bash scripts, or really any language you want to configure it) and safe enough for me not to have any issues with it. Sure, using Haskell might be better, if I knew Haskell. But I don't, and I'm not going to learn it any time soon. So it's a moot point.

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.
  - gnosis 17y ago
    Well, whether or not it's actually faster, it sure feels orders of magnitude faster. xmonad may use only 1000 lines of code for the window manager itself, but that's backed up by a rather large Haskell library (particularly when loading lots of contributed code). I know the resident memory size of xmonad is gigantic compared to musca. Manipulation of those large memory structures may be relatively slow, even if you use efficient algorithms (particularly on systems like my own, which use so much memory that some of my apps are swapped out). As for Haskell being high level and safe, I appreciate that. But it really does me little good when I don't know Haskell. The musca window manager doesn't require knowing Haskell, and I think it's just as flexible, and certainly high level enough (you can use bash scripts, or really any language you want to configure it) and safe enough for me not to have any issues with it. Sure, using Haskell might be better, if I knew Haskell. But I don't, and I'm not going to learn it any time soon. So it's a moot point.