ComboP is a way to combine multiple layouts in one workspace. I now have a portion of the workspace tabbed so that is where I can have multiple uzbl windows. On the other portion I have two terminals. One for Weechat and one for Mutt. These are situated in a tall layout that doesn’t resize so they will always have 50% of the available vertical space.

This would be useless to have on every workspace, I just want it on the one I have reserved for my browsing. So I went to look for another module and found it. It’s called PerWorkspace. It gives you the ability to set a layout for just one workspace and to have just one layout on a workspace, and multiple on all the others. It does make your layoutHook look like a mess.

Here is my layoutHook line, don’t forget the imports!:

,layoutHook = avoidStruts $ onWorkspace "www" (named "Tabbed" (windowNavigation (combineTwo (TwoPane 0.03 0.5) (tabbed shrinkText tabConfig) (Mirror (tiled))))) $ tiled ||| named "HintedTall" (hintedTile XMonad.Layout.HintedTile.Tall) ||| noBorders Full

I think this is a great example of what Xmonad can do. You can mold and craft it into anything you want and it will do it for you. I just love my setup at the moment. If only there was a good cli-feed reader that could synchronize with Google Reader…

The way xmonad handles two (or more) screens is the way all window managers should do it. You have one set of workspaces. The screens are portals to these tags. So you can have workspace one on screen one and workspace two on screen two. Then you can have workspace two on screen one and workspace four on screen two. A picture to demonstrate:

The configuration file is easy to edit and I like it a lot. Even more so then the config file of awesome. It sounds scary to edit a haskell file but haskell is a nice, easy to understand language. My config file is found here.

So the reason I sticked with it were the multiple screen support, config file and the simplicity. I know a 300mb dependecy for a ~1 mb window manager is not really KISS but the way XMonad works is really KISS. That is because only manages your windows. You can choose youre own panel(if any). I like it!

So I installed Openbox. And it was amazing. The configuration file is very nice, and the whole wm is really clean. It’s in my opinion the best floating window manager. The right-click menu is amazing, you can choose your panel yourself and it has no dependencies! So I ran Openbox for a while. But I only had terminals and a movie and a browser. The browser on screen one, and the rest on screen two. So I figured that with a tiling window manager I would use the space on my screens more efficiently. Sadly, Openbox doesn’t have a tiling feature. Wich I pitty, and quite a lot of archers with me.

But tiling window managers are hard to configure. Xmonad is configured in haskell, wmii in ruby or python and dwm in C. And I am not a programmer (yet). But I tried Xmonad for a while, it’s very nice, the dual screen support is amazing, but I hate installing 300 MB(!) of dependency’s for one program.

But then I found Awesome. And Awesome has an awesome name ánd an awesome configuration file. It is easy to understand and edit. But awesome 3.0 (it’s 2.3 now) is going to have a lua configuration file. And I don’t think that is an improvement. Awesome was the window manager that made it easy to tile.

So I tried dwm, becuase I love the idea of simplicity. Also the configuration file is really nice and clear. More so than awesome’s lua configuration file. But dwm doesn’t do dual screen as awesome. So I am going to stick with awesome for the time being. Learning lua, but when dwm does dual screen like awesome, wich means one statusbar per screen and different tiling layouts for each screen, I am going to install dwm right away. Do, by any chance, you know if I can start two instances of dwm, one for each screen? And what window manager do you use and why?