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XMonad and Gnome: The best of 2 worlds

To tile or not to tile, that’s the question. GNOME has always fulfilled my needs of a desktop environment. Nothing has ever been able to lure me away from GNOME. Its screensaver, its network manager, its power management and GTK applications, it all perfectly fits together. On the other hand, maximizing the usage of the monitor’s space is a great and appealing idea that surely leads to more productivity; no more window resizing , no more window overlap, no more empty gaps on the desktop. A superb idea indeed. Ultimately it was something I really had to try out. So I did.

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.