XMONAD-CONFIGURATION

The present repository contains my working configuration of XMonad.

I am using it as a playground to test lenses and prisms.

The module Switch found in the source code requires, perhaps, some additional comments. It is used to ensure exhaustive pattern matching. This is not really required in practice since GHC can issue a warning if invoked with -Wall option. It is nonetheless of interest to be able to do it at the level of the language type system. The explanations of how this works are given in doc/switchCover.hs which you can also load in GHCi. Note that there exists a similar way to impose completeness of value initialization for record data types.

INSTALLATION

1. Install xmobar:

   cabal update  
   cabal install xmobar  
   

2. Clone xmonad-configuration from GitHub and install the package into a cabal sandbox:

   git clone ...  
   cd xmonad-configuration  
   cabal sandbox init  
   cabal update  
   cabal install   
   

   Note that this will install xmonad and xmonad-contrib as dependencies.

   If the build is successful, the directory ./.cabal-sandbox/bin must contain, apart from the xmonad binary, a pair of files, showVol-ext and xmonad-ext.

3. Create a backup of ~/.xmonad:

   mv ~/.xmonad ~/.xmonad.orig  
   

4. xmonad-ext is a binary file which is meant to replace the original xmonad binary associated to xmonad.hs in ~/.xmonad.

   showVol-ext is an auxiliary binary "show volume" to be used by xmobar as mentioned in the configuration file xmobar-config/xmobar.config.

   Create symbolic links in ~/.xmonad running a script:

   ./install.sh
   

5. The link ~/.xmonad/start-xmonad points to ~/.xmonad/xmonad-ext/xmonad, which in turn points to the xmonad-ext binary in the sandbox. Edit /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop:

   [Desktop Entry]  
   Encoding=UTF-8  
   Name=XMonad  
   Comment=Lightweight tiling window manager  
   Exec=~/.xmonad/start-xmonad  
   Icon=  
   Type=XSession  
   

Logout, select XMonad in the display manager, and re-login.

Have fun!