Sam Danielson

Xmonad is an awesome window manager and these are my complements as a fanatical user. The thing I love about Xmonad is that it just seems to get everything right. Wmii, my first favorite tiling WM, really got me interested and I found no fault with it until I used Xmonad.

Internally Xmonad manages focus with a zipper data structure. Though there are more naive approaches used in early versions it’s clear from maintainer Don Stewart’s blog that a lot of thought went in to my sanity as a user. The sorted order provided by the zipper allows for completely automatic management of my windows. For me, the order reduces my workspace to essentially one dimension. In Wmii I used vim key-bindings to move focus up/down/left/right. In Xmonad I use only two keys for this. In every other window manager Alt+Tab is a total pain due to the random order of the windows or the fact that they need to be manually sorted. Xmonad always inserts and deletes windows in a way which preserves order as if I were inserting or deleting lines from a text file. Better, Xmonad can be extended with, among other things, algorithms to arrange windows based on this order. There are tabbed, grid, and circular layouts to name a few. One interesting extension even arranges windows in a Fibonacci spiral.

There’s plenty of fud floating around about the inextensibility of purely functional programs but Xmonad proves otherwise, at least for Haskell’s case. I feel like a dog watching TV when viewing the source but I do know this; the extensions manage a variety of state and the code is concise. Oh, and the whole thing runs in a memory image a little larger than an instance of bash.

Special thanks to Spencer Janssen for authoring the project. Xmonad is doing everything just right so my Archlinux machine is polished like a Macintosh, only more useful.