xmonad

After reading an article about how Gnome and KDE have poor usage of screen real-estate I have spent some time customizing my desktop. First things like switching to thiner window decorations and menus and changing the gnome font sizes to be smaller so the menu bars at the top and bottom could be shrunk. Gnome customizations helped but not as much as changing firefox. I noticed that the most wasted space on my screen was the remainder of the bar after the file/edit/.../help menu in firefox. I moved my address bar and search bar to there and rearranged things so I was able to remove my nav bar completely. I was pretty happy with all my new found screen space.

Then for the holidays I was gifted an eeepc. I absolutely love it. Very small and much more power than I need to just browse and ssh home. The only problem was that it comes with xandros and the Asus repositories have been broken for the past week. So I started doing some research on other distributions of GNU/Linux to install on there. I still have not decided what I want on it, suggestions are welcome, but I am leaning towards arch Linux with xmonad.

In my research of lightweight window managers for my eee I discovered xmonad and am currently enfatuated. xmonad is a tiling window manager written in Haskell. Tiling means that it does not display windows in the traditional sense but always has all windows visable on the screen but tiled. It is super lightweight and suppoestly insanely stable. So here is a screen shot of my current desktop.

The system has many tiling algorithms which auto-magically re-tile the windows when a new one is opened or closed. It can cycle through a set of different modes in which the windows are displayed in different ways, including one taking up the whole screen, and is very customizable. There is a guided tour about xmonad if anyone would like to learn more about it.

Notice what I ended up doing is embedding xmonad into my gnome setup so I still have a full gnome desktop but uses xmonad as the window manager. This was great because all the customizations and applications I have already configured for my system still work as is. I was also able to rebind the xmonad keys to keep the workspace switching commands I am used to. I have my xmonad.hs available if anyone wants to play with my configuration. Tiling window managers are fun and appear to be much more productive than anything I have used before.