[xmonad] Re: Project to make tiling window managers more accessible to newcomers

mail at justinbogner.com mail at justinbogner.com
Thu Apr 9 11:58:51 EDT 2009


Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> writes:
> One idea I've always wondered about is a menubar based tiling WM. The
> user, say, middle-clicks (hardly anyone uses middle-click), and then a
> geometrical menu pops up along the lines of
> XMonad.Actions.GridSelect. In it are all the default operations -
> 'kill', 'refresh',  'sendMessage NextLayout', etc. The user
> left-clicks on one and voila.
>

If people don't use middle click, then how do they paste text in X11?
Other than that minor nitpick, this idea seems fairly interesting, I
sometimes want to be able to use my computer with only the mouse, rather
than only the keyboard.

<SNIP...>

> * In theory if you wanted to make a menubar that worked with arbitrary
> keymaps, you'd need some sort of Show equivalent for functions, since
> you need to be able to have a textual equivalent to whatever crazy
> things people may do - how could you really foresee my binding of
> 'runOrRaise "amarok" (className =? "amarokapp")'? - which gets you
> into complex territory fast. But if you're serious about the default
> config, you could just write up a static [String]. Which would also
> let you use more newbie-friendly names: instead of 'spawn
> "exe=`dmenu_path | dmenu` && eval \"exec $exe\""' you could just have
> 'run Dmenu'.

This is easily solved by having keybindings be a tuple of a name and a
function, the name being what you use for Show. Ideally, there'd be a
typeclass or something for functions so people can skip the names if
they don't use these features, and that would simply cripple this
particular UI.



More information about the xmonad mailing list