The Linux Cast

Xmonad Is My Next Project

Added 2023-02-24 21:06:52 +0000 UTC

I have a long and bloody history when it comes to the Xmonad window manager. I hate Haskell with a passion. Mostly, it's a me problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with Haskell or Xmonad, I just don't feel smart enough to actually use them. Every time I try, I get frustrated by them.

But, it's time to try them again. One of my upper-tier patrons has asked, and I have agreed to do so. I don't know yet how I'm going to do it. I think it will start off as a side project on my laptop before it moves to my main machine, but I may change my mind.

So, I'm trying Xmonad again. It's going to be something I try to do long term. I'm not going to be giving it my full attention while the #6MonthLinuxChallenge is going on, so I don't expect to make many videos about it until this challenge is over, but if I'm going to give it a real shot, might as well start soon.

We'll see how it goes. I've tried it three times before to varying success. Usually, I have failed because of something that I just couldn't figure out. Usually, it's scratchpads. I did get it figured out once, but the Xmonad implementation is not great. Granted that wasn't a long exposure time to that feature and it's been at least a year since then, so maybe I'll do better this time.

And that's kind of the hope. That now that I'm a little more comfortable with programming languages (C and Python), I may be able to finally get my head around Haskell enough at least to use Xmonad for a while.

I guess we'll see. This is a very short blog post this week. RL is kicking my ass, so this was a bit of a rush job. Hope everyone has a good week.

Matt