xmonad alongside xfce ...

[jsfarinet]

To make a long story short: Sometimes (for translations, book lecturing and corrections) a split screen comes handy. In the past - on a big screen (1920x1080) - i had a JWM desktop environment and jwm does nicely a very basic tiling (upper half/lower half, left half/right half). Now, for an xfce de i installed xmonad alongside with following this instructions:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

That works not that bad - i have the panel accessible, i always have via ALT-F1 the xfce menu. So, the basics are ok, for me.

But, i'd like to have the following tweaks though i'm not familiar at all with haskell + xmonad:
(actually, it's only on the first workspace) or, alternatively, and possibly even better, a kind of conky panel with all essential infos and accesses (like sound, network - wicd for wireless, ecc. ).But i absolutely do not know how to use conky throughout xmonad;

my wallpaper as background (at least for the empty windows)

correct use of compton, eventually ...

The xmonad comunity is somehow intimidating - so came up to my mind to ask here ...

PS. I'll also give i3 a try ... (Since i'm not a mouse allergical Ratpoisin was (is?) not my first choice: i looked into awesome, but at a first glance it isn't what i'm looking for).

[jsfarinet]

One problem i solved, in the meantime:

I set the background twice:

1) in .xinitrc adding the line

Code: Select all

feh --bg-fill /directory to the backgroundfile

and
2) adding the same statement to the xfce startup options.

That works

[mimosa]

Thanks, I'll have to try that some time!

The haskell & xmonad people are actually perfectly friendly, but it's probably true they tend to be quite self-sufficient. It's really all about exploring and trying suggested configs, and fiddling with them. I never got too far with that myself, partly because I was looking for something fairly barebones.

How did you install ghc, and Xmonad itself? I used to maintain a package for ghc, but now I think the best way is to install the generic Linux version of the Haskell Platform. I'm not too sure how that combines with any Haskell packages from SBo, though.

[jsfarinet]

I installed all via SBo (sourcery).

I'm the last who can compare the tarball with the slackbuild - what i can say is, that apparently most things work out of the box. Sure, i'll have to fiddle with the settings but, for a not that hardcore linus nerd, i think the option to have always the xdg-menu of xfce handy, in case of need is really nice. And in the end,also i3 is not that easy to configure - calculating that you would have to build the DE from the ground up (although the configuration itself might be more accessible, since plain text, boh? ).

There are some smaller headcaches, i'll have to deal with, but generally it's a nice setup.

[jsfarinet]

...How did you install ghc, and Xmonad itself? I used to maintain a package for ghc, but now I think the best way is to install the generic Linux version of the Haskell Platform. I'm not too sure how that combines with any Haskell packages from SBo, though.

As i said, i installed from sourcery which creates in /usr/lib64/ a ghc directory.

Now, in practical use, i'm under the impression the settings i try to set in $HOME/.xmonad/xmonad.hs are not respected: E.g. i try to change the default modifier key (ALT) to the windows key (Super) - but although i think i do it correctly (i'm using the proposed setting on the haskell website there seems to be no way to have this changement. May be, there are environment variables to set somewhere ... (?)

Also, i would like to have a shortcut for the session logout, but that does not work too (the only way is to set a shortcut to the Xfce logout app (in xfce settings).

[mimosa]

This sounds like the sort of problem I was thinking of; I'm afraid I am not sure what solution to suggest. I think that, analogous to the bash $PATH, ghc (or perhaps rather, cabal, the ghc package manager) may have a notion of where it looks for things.

In my case, I see I have a symlink from /usr/local/bin to the xmonad installed by cabal:

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mimosa[~]$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/xmonad
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Sep 22  2014 /usr/local/bin/xmonad -> /home/mimosa/.cabal/bin/xmonad

but you have done it differently, so that is unlikely to work in your case. I'm sorry not to be more helpful. It may be that if you look on SBo, there are some indications.

[jsfarinet]

What is cabal?

Yes, me too i thought i should do something with symlinks. But, i think it's worth the pain .... Xmonad is really very smooth and smart as a tiling wm (compared to awesome or Herbsluft (which i looked a bit into). May be i3 ... (?) (I now there is a very nice, but unfortunately systemd based edition in the Manjaro world; wherefrom one could try to copy some settings tricks ). But in this moment, xmonad seems the best - to me ...

Cheers!

PS. Thanks a lot to you for your patience!

[DidierSpaier]

Maybe this can be useful if you didn't come across it yet:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xm ... and_xmonad

[jsfarinet]

In the meantime i got really *VERY* friendly help from the #xmonad channel on freenode. Now my configuration file - for the integration with xfce - looks like this:

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import XMonad
import XMonad.Config.Xfce

import qualified Data.Map as M
import qualified XMonad.StackSet as W
import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks
import XMonad.Hooks.DynamicBars
import XMonad.Hooks.EwmhDesktops
import XMonad.Util.EZConfig

main = xmonad xfceConfig
      { manageHook = manageDocks <+> manageHook defaultConfig
      , logHook    = ewmhDesktopsLogHook
      , layoutHook = avoidStruts $ layoutHook defaultConfig
      , handleEventHook = ewmhDesktopsEventHook
      , startupHook = ewmhDesktopsStartup
      , modMask    = mod4Mask
      }

The only thing i still have to figure out is, how to configure the XMonad.Hooks.DynamicBars to have the xfce panel on *ANY* workspace ...

Cheers!

[jsfarinet]

Ok, i found out:

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import XMonad.Hooks.DynamicBars

is for xmobar and similar. Not for the xfce panel. Recompiling xmonad without it and restarting, now gives the xfce panel on any (of the 9 default) workspace(s) and the win key (Super) as xmonads default modifier key, so that the Alt commands defined in xfce are not doubled. They work fine - i can call terminal, default browser, thunar or email by predefined xfce shortcuts at any moment in xmonad. So, complessively, all is fine.

Now, i'm up to learn a bit haskell to be able, at least to understand a bit what i'm doing when i fill in preconfigured snippets (eventually ).