[xmonad] Prospective development of Xmonad

[Jochen Keil]

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Dear list,

recently I looked around in the world of tiling window managers. In
particular I looked at wmii, i3 and awesome. They offer various
features which I was very fond off, yet none was so feature complete
that I was convinced to make the switch.

Then I started to think about the current state of xmonad and came to
the conclusion that compared to the aforementioned window manager it
seems that some dust has settled upon xmonad.

Finally I came up with a small list of features I'd like to implement
for xmonad, but I fear that this would break many if not all modules
in contrib. I'll discuss every item in detail.

1) wmii like tags

The current workspace model seems a bit inflexible to me. After trying
 wmii's window tagging model I think that this is a far more flexible,
dynamic and better approach to managing windows. Want your browser
visible with your editor/terminal windows you use in project A? No
problem, associate tag A with your browser, same for tag C, etc.

2) Xrandr support

I've extended the current bindings (Graphics.X11.Xrandr) so that they
would be usable for what I intend to do with xmonad. There's a pull
request on github and I hope dwagner (who reads this list too, afaik,
hint, hint ;) will merge it soon.

My idea about Xrandr support for xmonad would be similar to how it's
done in i3. I'd create a separate config for every output (in the
Xrandr terminology, e.g. DVI1 or LVDS, etc.).

Therefore, every output would be associated with a set of windows, and
a layout which would be used to generate the "view" for the windows.
If an output becomes inactive the windows could easily be shown on
another output (e.g. by using something like a hierarchical
ManageHook, like try 1; try 2; fallback 3)

This would especially shine together with wmii like tags.
To motivate this idea a bit more: Imagine attaching your external
monitor to your laptop and all your windows will be automatically
sorted to the right screen, e.g. the browser and the editor to the
external monitor, your email client to your laptops monitor.

3) A tree hierarchy for windows

I had some issues with the stackset over the past years, mainly
because it makes it hard to write an column layout which simply splits
the current window either automatically or manually.
Furthermore a tree can be simply transformed to a stack (the other way
round is nearly impossible). That way most of the (at least pure)
layouts could be kept, layouts with side effects (especially on the X
monad) probably not.

4) Reparenting

This would be nice for having window titles, etc. Only for the sake of
completeness for the moment, since I haven't thought about this much yet.

5) XCB instead of Xlib

This is kind of optional. The XHB (haskell xcb bindings) lack some
features which would make it hard to fully convert xmonad to xcb.
However, there is Xlib-xcb which facilitates the usage of Xlib
functions with xcb. All that's required is a simple hsc2hs wrapper to
this.

I apologize for the length of this email, but I wanted to point out my
motivation and make my ideas clear. I'm also asking explicitly for
feedback from current developers.
If you have an idea on how to implement these ideas without breaking
contrib, that would be fine. Or maybe you want to start out with
something on this list, that would be even better :)

I also thought about creating a clone/fork of xmonad, but that's
something I'd like to avoid, since I believe that the world does not
need yet another wm.

Best wishes,

Jochen
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