Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

Installation: After you've gotten ghci and cabal from your favourite package manager, just do:

> sudo cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib

Then you can get dmenu or dzen for a small menu and trayer for a small system tray.

Then use a premade config file from here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive and mess around with it.

To learn the keybindings, print this out or make it your wallpaper: http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/xmonad-cheatsheet/

For them ubuntu users, if oneiric broke a lot of things you can follow this: http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ That should allow you to select an xmonad session as opposed to a unity one during login.

As a general rule you can simply use xmonad as your window manager and just launch gnome-settings-daemon (or was it gnome-config-daemon?) to get all the theming, font antialiasing, etc. If you run nm-applet manually, that should launch the networking stuff (if it didn't already). I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that.

Edit: I use this one: https://github.com/vicfryzel/xmonad-config

It works great with multiple monitors, alt+w and alt+e move focus between monitors, and then I can swap which workspace is in which monitor really easily to move things around.

The instructions from the wiki for Unity-2d integration also work fine: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Unity_...

That runs xmonad with the unity panel; it doesn't add the launcher, but I was never a fan of that to begin with (in part because its interaction with xmonad wasn't great, but I never spent much time trying to get it working properly either so it might be possible). The key difference is the wiki assumes you're installing from cabal, where-as Mark's assume an apt-get installation which already comes with a .desktop file.

Note that the wiki instructions mention the need to explicitly add gaps at the top, which Mark's instructions didn't. (Also, that the wiki config doesn't actually launch the launcher!)

> I haven't tried using xmonad with the ubuntu panel and stuff, so I don't know about that.

Use XMonad.Config.Gnome.gnomeConfig as your base config. Log in with gnome as normal and do:

    pkill metacity
    pkill compiz
    sleep 3
    xmonad &

Not the most elegant solution, but it works.

That worked with Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how well that will work with Gnome 3 and/or Unity. Unity is pretty tied to Compiz (some portion of it is implemented as a Compiz plugin).

At this point, it's probably easier to either create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad (e.g. gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc) or to see about using XMonad as the window manager for XFCE.

Also, you used to be able to set the $WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable in ~/.gnomerc, to turn on XMonad as the window manager.

> ...create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad...

On Ubuntu at least I've had success with http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/

(Having the launcher floating around is annoying though, and removing it from the gnome-session file had some unpleasant side-effect that I don't remember.)

Can't you just select the session you want from gdm? Or did ubuntu take away that picker menu?

The default xmonad session just launches xmonad. Usually people want other things like pulse-audio, a power manager (like gnome-power-manager), etc launched.

This is why people want to use XMonad as Gnome's window manager.

I don't think using 'sudo' is necessarily a good idea: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/611

What is the correct way of starting exactly one instance of trayer if using gnome-session?

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