[Xmonad] the future of xmonad...

[David Roundy]

Hi Andrea,

You aren't the only refugee from ion3 here.  There's me and at least one
more (whose name escapes me).  But almost all of us have no X experience.
I've been hacking xmonad a bit, but really shouldn't be.  This morning I
was seeing about starting in on a tabbed layout.  The trouble I'm running
into is that xmonad currently has no code that involves drawing to the
screen, so there's no examples to modify! The other trouble is that it
seems like we'd need quite a bit of infrastructure to support drawing on
the screen.  At a minimum I think we'd need a layout to be able to create
"tab" windows and clean them up later, which will mean that the layout
needs to be notified when you switch layouts so it can delete the tabs, or
at least hide them.  And some way to define redraw functions would be
needed as well.  :(

The core xmonad developers (which doesn't include me) aren't (so far as I
can tell) ion3 refugees, and don't have the same desired features.  But
they do seem quite friendly to the idea of making xmonad extensible, and
for anything that can be done in XMonadContrib, we seem to be totally
open.

I'm also keen on hs-plugins support.  In principle, it's not considered
objectionable, so far as I can tell, but dons thinks hs-plugins is too
heavyweight for xmonad (paraphrasing from memory).

I'd say that xmonad source is pretty darn easy to modify, and small enough
that it doesn't require haddock.  But I also doubt haddock patches would
be rejected.

David