You’ll need 3 things:

• xmonad
• dzen2 >= rev. 267
• xdotool

Here are the things you’ll need to put in your xmonad.hs config:

import Data.List
 
-- Define amount and names of clickable workspaces.
myWorkspaces    = clickable . (map dzenEscape) $ nWorkspaces 0 ["main","web","chat","media","graph","browse","dev","mail"]
    where nWorkspaces n [] = map show [1 .. n]
          nWorkspaces n l  = init l ++ map show [length l .. n] ++ [last l]
          clickable l      = [ "^ca(1,xdotool key ctrl+F" ++ show (n) ++ ")" ++ ws ++ "^ca()" | (i,ws) <- zip [1..] l, let n = i ]

These lines will wrap every workspace name with ^ca, a click action available in dzen2 >= rev. 267. Xdotool is a small application that simulates pressed keys. You can alter the names of the workspaces to your likings. You do, however, have to change the key in the xdotool command to the key you use in XMonad to switch to a specific workspace. In my case, keys <ctrl>+F1 to <ctrl>+F8 are used to switch to workspaces 1 to 8.

Throughout your xmonad.hs you will need to replace all direct references to workspace names because now your first workspace for example, is named ^ca(1,xdotool key ctrl+F1)main^ca(). One way to do this is to use the following references instead:

-- Workspace variables
mainWs      = (myWorkspaces !! 0)
webWs       = (myWorkspaces !! 1)
chatWs      = (myWorkspaces !! 2)
mediaWs     = (myWorkspaces !! 3)
graphWs     = (myWorkspaces !! 4)
browseWs    = (myWorkspaces !! 5)
devWs       = (myWorkspaces !! 6)
mailWs      = (myWorkspaces !! 7)

Remember to use a dzen2 panel, as this click action is a dzen2 specific thing. Also don’t forget that if you have an urgent hook in your dzen2 pretty printer, you’ll have to rewrap the workspace with ^ca. You can find my entire confg file here

I’ve considered a few alternatives. KDM is of course out of the question. It doesn’t even come close to being lightweight and I’d rather use Windows than pull in any kind of KDE dependency. Viable alternatives are among others SLIM, Qingy and simply using startx to fire up XMonad. I’ve tryed out SLIM briefly in the past but wanted something even more simple and from what I’ve read, SLIM is not begin further developed. Startx is of course as easy as it can possibly get but is in itself featureless and only works well for a single user/session.

In the end I went with CDM, the Console Display Manager, developed by Ghost1227, a fellow Arch Linux user. It is a minimimalistic, full featured, dialog-based login manager written in pure bash. It supports multiple users/sessions and can start virtually any window manager or desktop environment. I am impressed that it can fire up multiple X sessions of the same user on different ttys.

One step closer to a GNOMEless system.

Since my last XMonad desktop, I’ve changed my wallpaper to something brighter to lighten things up (I usually don’t like dark colors or wallpapers) and adapted the text colors to match with everything else:

System Info:

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• Window Manager: XMonad
• GTK: Customized Ubuntu Human (not visible)
• Icons: Human Icon Set (not visible)
• Wallpaper: Napke
• Various: mpd & ncmpcpp, dzen2, conky, emesene, vim, urxvt

If there is anything else you would like to know, feel free to ask.

I’ve completely moved to the tiling window manager XMonad now to fully profit from my new 24″ monitor. It took me a while to get used to a tiling window manager but now that I got the hang of it, it’s not likely I’ll ever go back a regular floating desktop.

What you are seeing:

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• Window Manager: XMonad
• GTK: Customized Ubunt Human
• Icons: Human Icon set
• Wallpaper: Spy vs. Spy (deviantart)
• Various: Trayer for docking icons, Conky for displaying statistics, mpd song info and date/time, Irssi, MPlayer, ncmpc++

This leaves me with another question: What tiling window manager to choose? I’ve heared about most of them already while browsing the Arch Linux forum and started with dwm, known as the easiest tiling window manager to configure. Indeed, the configuration is fairly easy but it doesn’t resemble to the simplicity of GNOME or KDE at all. If you don’t read about it first, you start dwm and you’re left with nothing but an empty screen without even knowing how to run an application. While it is supposed to be easy, I still had some unresolved problems with naming my tags/workspaces and shifting windows to it. Though my incompetence is probably to blame, the developers’ unwillingness to document their work didn’t really help me either so I abandoned dwm. The second in line to try was Awesome. It’s very popular and probably the most feature rich one. Configuration is done in the programming language lua. Oddly enough I had a lot more success configuring it than dwm. A notorious downside of Awesome is its ever changing configuration syntax. While this is supposedly going to improve now lua is introduced, I’m not willing to put it to the test.

Opposed to the previous two, my experience with XMonad is a success story all the way. I believe XMonad outranks the others easily. Configuration is done in Haskell. While it’s perhaps not an easy way to configure things, it  allows  great flexibility. The developers have extensively documented each feature, illustrate a lot with simple examples and created a great faq that answers the  most important questions that come to mind. XMonad runs very smoothly and on top of everything, it can be easily integrated with every popular desktop environment. That last feature is a huge bonus. It simply replaces metacity (the window manager of GNOME) with XMonad. While this can be done with the other tiling window managers too, XMonad integrates very nicely in GNOME and handles the communcation between the two very well. I get the best of both worlds with no downsides. Well, there’s adownside, only not for me. It is required to install the +/- 100 MB Haskell compiler. Luckily for me, I need Haskell for my university courses.

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• GTK: Customized Ubuntu Human
• Window Manager: XMonad
• Icons: Ubuntu Human Icon Set
• Wallpaper: Rey Del Mundo

For starters, I fell in love with this wallpaper. I  got rid of metacity and finally switched to something moreproductive:  XMonad. Give me a hallelluja for tiling window managers. The only thing I’m still not happy with, are the font colors. I still have to find a matching color palette. Suggestions are always welcome. For those interested in my XMonad configuration file, feel free to ask. I’ll probably post it in upcoming article on XMonad as well.