[Xmonad] some basic xmonad questions

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 10:04:27PM -0700, brad clawsie wrote:
> i recently saw xmonad mentioned on reddit, but there was a quick
> followup that it was not quite ready for public use. has this changed?

Depends.  I haven't started hacking xmonad yet, but out of xmonad,
fvwm2, ion, ion3, ratpoison, sawfish, and twm I find xmonad by far the
easiest to use :)

> i am a current dwm user and generally love the tiling concept,
> although i do not care for dwm's source code-based config system. will
> xmonad support a plain-text conf file?

NEVER!!! :)

OK, it might.  but it really doesn't need one, haskell's syntax is
nice enough that the config file doesn't really smell like Haskell.
Here's a sample line:

 , ((modMask,               xK_t     ), spawn "sleep 0.1 ; exec /home/stefan/chvt 1")


> beyond being written in haskell, are there any compelling features in
> xmonad (planned or to-date) to differentiate it?

Much less code (~500 lines), Xinerama support, very active real-time
user support community in #haskell.

> how does xmonad compare to dwm with regards to system resrouce use?

The difference between C and Haskell is neglible compared to the
all-surpassing bloat of Xlib.  Spencer Janssen has received a SoC
grant to write a Haskell binding for the much-leaner second generation
XCB library, so chances are Xmonad will soon use much less resources
than dwm. 

Stefan