[xmonad] Bluetile

[Daniel Goldin]

I figured I'd jump in here to give a "beginner"'s perspective. I'm a non-programmer type who has been using Linux and Emacs for years for one reason -- a need to have some control of the process as well as the content when I write. For this reason I moved recently to tiling WMs. I tried wmii for a bit -- but hit bugs I wasn't able to solve easily. I tried a few others but was daunted by a user base downright hostile to non-programmers. Awesome worked well for me, but was poorly documented.

Finally I found Xmonad -- which I love -- and I'm not turning back.

It's fast, I can configure it pretty easily by looking through configurations on the Wiki and cutting and pasting, and most of all, it has a friendly following of smart folks who seem willing to help amateurs such as myself.

That being said, I would have been thrilled had there been a version that might have helped me get up and running more easily. It took me almost a week to get a really good usable version going (I had most of my trouble getting xmobar to work well.) A fairly simple out-of-the-box version with good documentation that would have allowed a begiiner to delve more deeply gradually would have been heaven.

In short, as a beginner, my ideal version of xmonad would be an out-of-the-box version with great *educationally oriented* documentation.

I hope this is useful.

d.


On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Christian Walther wrote:

>Hi,
>
>2009/8/26 Thomas Friedrich <info at suud.de>:
>[...]
>> I agree, please don't mess up the Xmonad-Core.  I like Xmonad because
>> its so different to any other WM.. simple, clean, elegant, customizable,
>> and did I mention clean?
>
>Same here. I really think that telling people about tiling is a good
>idea, and having a more "beginner friendly" branch like bluetile is
>also a good thing. I'm not sure how to put it without sounding rude or
>arrogant, but I like xmonad because of the reasons Thomas stated
>above, which, for me, includes (or rather means) the absence of
>"beginner friendly" features.
>
>>From my point of view there are many window managers that deal with
>"beginner friendly" features. Extending xmonads default configuration
>in this way would mean that it's "just another WM".
>It all comes down to packaging anyway. There are some cool
>configurations in the Wiki, why not create a package xmonad-gnome or
>xmonad-kde for example? I've to disagree with Gwern here: A normal
>user who doesn't know about xmonad probably doesn't want it. So in
>case someone selects xmonad as his window manager of choice, there
>should at least be some basic knowledge of xmonad and the way it deals
>with windows.
>
>Christian
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-- 
Daniel Goldin 
213.926.1960