[Xmonad] how amenable to making xmonad less minimalistic?

[David Roundy]

Hi all,

I've just gotten xmonad running (in a separate X server, for simplicity),
and it looks like a nice start, and the code looks pretty elegant, but I'm
wondering how amenable it's going to be to added complexity?

I'm a current ion3 user who's mostly content, but a bit frustrated by its
limitations, and the complexity of configuring it using lua.  On the other
hand, I've also gotten my setup working pretty much as I like now, so it's
not really worthwhile to switch.

The features I most like in ion3 that are missing in xmonad are the (very
crude) ability to configure the layout based on the windows themselves and
the tabs.  And what I *really* like (which took a fair amount of sweat and
pain) is the ability to set up a single command that prompts me for a
directory, and then creates a new workspace with the layout I want, and in
it launches several programs (typically an emacs, a couple of terminals and
an xclock, but only one terminal on my laptop), with the chosen directory
set as the working directory for each program, and any future programs
launched in that workspace also has the same working directory.

All of this would be much easier to code in Haskell, provided the framework
is there.  So I'm just wondering if there will be hooks to provide some of
this.  LayoutDesc, for example, seems to be written in a sufficiently
minimalistic way that adding a new layout would seem somewhat like
surgery.  I imagine we could have a design something like

data LayoutDesc = LayoutDesc { !layout :: Rectangle -> [Window]
                                       -> [(Window, Rectangle)] }

which would have the advantage of allowing commands to introduce arbitrary
bindings.  The catch is that we've lost the ability to tune the
tileFraction, so I've not come up with a real solution.  But I'd like to be
able to play with new layouts without hacking directly in Operations.hs,
and we really shouldn't need to add new parameters to LayoutDesc for every
degree of freedom we might want to give our layout.  i.e. there's got to be
a better way!

My first goal (but not most important) would be to ensure that my xclocks
always remain square.  This would avoid much of the insanity that comes
with the current inflexible layout of xmonad (i.e. either the xclock takes
up much of the screen and is very distorted, or all but one of my windows
is a small square of wasted space).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net