Configuring The Xmobar Panel In Xmonad

One of the trickiest things about setting up the Xmonad tiling window manager is configuring the panel, which for most Xmonad users is Xmobar. When new users look at the example configs and the documentation for Xmobar, they can be overwhelmed by the lengthy manual and the multitude of options available. But it's not as complicated as it seems.
REFERENCED:
► hackage.haskell.org/package/x... - Xmobar Documentation
► raw.githubusercontent.com/jao... - Example Xmobar config
► gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/tr... - DT's Xmonad config
► gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/tr... - DT's Xmobar config
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@andrearossato4087]

Hi, I originally wrote xmobar in 2007, when I was heavily contributing to the xmonad development. Later on Jose (jao) took over and added some nice new features, even though I think that the core of the status bar is still very close to what I wrote at that time. For me it is a real joy to see that people are still finding useful and so still using the code I wrote, with others contributing new features, documentation or tutorials like this one, for helping others to efficiently use their computers. This is the beauty of free software and I'm happy I contributed a little bit to it too. Thank you. andrea ps: the configuration file is a text representation of the Haskell data type that stores the configuration variables. What is cool, with Haskell, is that the parser for reading this textual representations of a data types comes for free and you do not have to write one yourself -- and I already needed a parser for reading the template for displaying the collected information. On the other side the built-in data type parser is not forgiving and that may result in incomprehensible (for non haskellers) error messages. But memory footprint and efficient parallel execution of different processes were the main goal -- a status bar should try to run with as little resources as possible in order to minimize its interference with the system it is meant to monitor.

[@hhhyyy4375]

I love you.

[@anantgupta7916]

Great, red first line & replied

[@anantgupta7916]

@@andrewangel9362 But i will search in duckduckgo

[@andrearossato4087]

@@johnrinehart I think you are confusing me with someone else: I never said I was disillusioned with the quality of Linux desktop innovation, far from it, and, actually, I do not have a personal web site. I stopped working on xmobar because I didn't need any more features (I'm still using my original codebase) and when I was kicked out from the xmonad community I started working on a Haskell implementation of the Citation Style Language for Pandoc, which took much of my time -- then, and once again, for lack of time I stopped working on it too and John MacFarlane took over and kept working on what is now pandoc-citeproc. So I left to the free software community a couple of projects that happened to be a bit successful and this is something I'm quite proud of, even though I do not code for the community any longer, but just because I now have different priorities.

[@johnrinehart]

@@andrearossato4087 Please see my amendment above. My sincerest apologies for the confusion.

[@griof]

It is surprising that a person like you is aware about how good reading docs is. I'm a software engineer, you'd be surprised how many colleges don't care about reading docs properly

[@robbyoconnor]

A lot of people seem to have an allergy to basic searching

[@Phydoux2112]

If it's digitally searchable, I have no problem with that. I've seen some documents (mostly pdfs created from jpg, png, etc files) that are terrible to read especially if they don't have an index. You can't search for test in a picture. A lot of the stuff on the web is very noob friendly. Even if it's totally geek speak.

[@robbyoconnor]

@@Phydoux2112 Most of it is searchable.

[@Phydoux2112]

You should do a whole xmonad series. I'd love to see that. Just spend 20 to 30 minutes on something for each video. I think that would be very cool.

[@harryedgeworth74]

Was just here thinking the upload/download icons were mixed up, then I checked your Gitlab and you already realised with your commit 2 days ago :D

[@marcovirtual]

OMG I spent the entire afternoon customizing my xmonad and xmobar config and here comes another video from DT. THis will help me a lot! Thank you!

Ofcourse, there is always good content here & not there "Linus ... channel" pff...

Ohh sei italiano?:)) Be compra un nuovo pc o nuva platforma, DT ha un mostrelino de pc dektop... Ogi linux kernel ha bisogno tanto potere per volare, non e come prima 5, 10, o' 15:) anni fa?! Te salluto, ogni benne "amico". [ ;

[@AndersJackson]

This is where you are brilliant, DT. Your vidoes have made me start to watch into hacking Linux again. Like 25-30 year ago. :-)

[@nekoill]

Yay! I thought about it hard enough and you actually did it, you absolutely lovely person!

[@hhhyyy4375]

Just finished configuring my bar yesterday!

[@drishalballaney6590]

finally, a proper video dedicated to xmobar

[@beke2345]

I studied your configs for the last week and this is exactly what I needed. BIG thanks.

[@umka7536]

I tried to start from DT config, but is so massive, that I just started from default and built my own config. Only couple things I picked from DT's config.

[@beke2345]

@@umka7536 yep same here, but I'm glad that DT covers xmonad so well bcs I'm just starting in this field and I'm pretty sure xmonad is gonna be my favorite wm for a bit.

[@wumi2419]

@@beke2345 Only thing i don't really like is how bad floating windows are for me. XMonad often tries to do something weird to size of windows that should be created as floating, especially if window is trying to open on my vertical screen.

[@umka7536]

@@wumi2419 For most common floating apps I just defined rules and particular sizes using doRectFloat and XMonad.StackSet. I took it from DT's config, BTW. import qualified XMonad.StackSet as W ... myManageHook = composeAll [ className =? "Deadbeef" --> doRectFloat (W.RationalRect 0.0 0.03 0.5 0.5) ] Opens Deadbeef floating in the position I want. Deadbeef player window size is 50% of screen horizontally, 47% vertically. Left top corner of window is position on point with (X,Y) = (0% of screen size, 3% of screen size)

[@Aerodos12]

Might consider adding this to my distro. Thanks for sharing!

[@4w0ken]

true linux lover this guy.

[@andrewcarpin2850]

Thanks DT! Needed this!

[@stomponpie]

I don't click on a youtube video to get a lecture on reading the documentation! I'm here trying to escape that and get the easy shortcuts that mean I don't learn and have to keep coming back to videos rather than solving problems on my own!

[@peteronfilm]

This is finally gonna make my xmonad usable 🕺🏽thx!

[@thetreeofclues]

I love xmobar. I love the way it (and xmonad) works with my 3 monitors. I even use it in some other window managers.

[@DistroTube]

I played about with xmobar with herbstluftwm once. But ended up using polybar in my herbstluftwm configs because I figured if anyone ever wanted my herbstluftwm config, they probably wouldn't want to use xmobar due to the Haskell dependcies.

[@thetreeofclues]

@@DistroTube yeah, people get confused why I have so many packages on my system with such a minimal window manager, haha. Thankfully they're really small packages

[@anikbiswasarnob]

@@DistroTube DT, polybar is not available in debian. My only option there is to use the default dzen2 and I don't like the way it is. I'll now config xmobar to use with herbstluftwm. Thanks a lot for this video.

[@favor94]

@@anikbiswasarnob its available if i see on the polybar github page, you can also build it from source

[@andrewcarpin2850]

Now on to new gentoo content 😬 Edit: only made this comment because my next suggested video was the old gentoo install part 1. KZbin is throwing you under the bus DT!!!!

[@arrtemfly]

thank you so much, it was such a pain in the arse for me...

[@lupanama1960]

that's a lot of pp's there

[@shan6333]

Hey DT, In default case xmonad only shows 1 workspaces per window but how did you bring all your workspaces visible ???

[@iampraneetverma]

Hey Derek, it's been a year since this video about configuring xmobar in xmonad, i tried to follow it but i think the constant updates in haskell and xmonad packages made it hard to configure, like i can never make the workspace icons work on the left side that "UnsafeStdinReader" does not work properly maybe new imports are necessary or names are changed, can you consider making a fresh new updated video about configuring xmonad and xmobar? Till then i think i have to use tint2 bar but i like xmobar better.

[@Phydoux2112]

So, I have 3 monitors. All 3 are 1920x1080 but one is a 39" TV that sits above my 2 smaller 24" monitors. I'm guessing that I could get the monitor placement values from xrandr and put those coordinates in each xmobar config files. Do I have the right idea? I've never gotten your xmobar files to work with my monitor setup and that's probably why.

[@poms3559]

Thanks for listening to my comments.

[@nikhilmosamkar1689]

He's the coolest dad

[@tamrix]

With your tray bar on your top right, are you just leaving space in your xmobar config and launching trayer (or something similar) within that space?

[@DistroTube]

I have a script that dynamically adjusts the width of xmobar to allow for trayer's width depending on how many icons it has in it.

[@starymarine]

Are there any "plugin" to show CWM groups with active group on xmobar?

[@TheTtmx]

Was on this exactly yesterday, what about the systray?

[@netbotcl586]

Why check for kernel update every 3600 seconds? It only get updated when you reboot, so why not just run it once?

[@satria3001Al]

You can centralize the modules by putting them between the parentheses "}{", if you use the parentheses as the alignsep, such as ....} %date% {.......

[@PierpaoloMingolla]

Wait those are deciseconds!? I thought they were milliseconds. Now I understand the delays in my commands.

[@ruirodrigues705]

the only downside for me in Xmobar is when using it with trayer, if i have apps that insert icons on it, trayer starts to grow and overlaps Xmobar information... I don't know if this is fixable, but it really annoys me... :/

[@DistroTube]

I have a script that adjusts the empty space on my xmobar dynamically to accomodate the icons that are added/removed from trayer. Check out: gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/tree/master/.config/xmobar The trayer-padding-icon script is what you want. ;)

[@ruirodrigues705]

@@DistroTube thz a lot DT! :)

[@f23anone82]

guys is there an applet for sound / volume control similar to nm-applet for network applet? So it is minimal and not related to any de

[@rialseebran2072]

there is one for pulse it's in the AUR just search for applets

[@sambird7]

Hey there, anyone have the problem where the internet speed and CPU widget just say "updating" forever? anyone know how to fix this? I'm pretty much just using DT's dotfiles.

[@aserillll]

The internet speed is using the Ethernet interface, yours might not be the same interface so you might have to adjust the “enp6s0” in the Run Network section to be what your computer uses for the interface

[@alexburns5767]

Only problem with xmobar & xmonad for me is that there's empty space where the xmobar would be on my second monitor, which isn't too big of a deal. Although, maybe I'll just have to make a second bar for my monitor :)

[@rialseebran2072]

I think you can fix that. DT has a triple monitor setup on his Gitlab.

[@edwardnihal248]

is it possible to have a one window opened and then all programs opened in tabs like in web browsers?

[@netbotcl586]

you can use the tabbed layout.

[@roottoot6028]

Those gaps are just a liiiiiiittle big ... ;-))

[@YoutubeChannel-gg3hf]

How did u get the xmonad logo on ur xmobar?

[@aserillll]

You need to download the Haskell xpm logo, place it in the .xmonad folder, and then in your xmobar config you need to import the icon and use it when setting the template I can link you my dot files if it would be easier to understand

[@richieashton3927]

Great Video. Can someone help me? I just want to know how to keybind a program like htop or vifm. Already bound most of my programs in xmonad. But don't know the one to launch a terminal based program. New to linux. Using Arch Linux with Xmonad Window Manager. Don't need any xmobar. Just want to know the command or how to write it. Thanks in Advance. Bless.

[@Phydoux2112]

I'm no pro but since no one has answered your question, I figured I'd share my line for htop. , ("M-M1-h", spawn (myTerminal ++ " -e htop ")) That's Mod4+Alt+h to load htop. You can change the keybinding like this , ("M-M1-m", spawn (myTerminal ++ " -e mc ")) to load something else. That second line opens midnight commander in a terminal. I've got those mixed in with my other keybindings. Hope that helps! Enjoy!

[@user-hk7uj9ng1n]

how to add dependency in xmobar otf-font-awesome

[@moha_linus]

Hello sir First thank you for your efforts Second I have problem with xmonad config Without clickable workspace I can't switch between workspaces only if i click on : Keymod shift and "+" I can't use numbers My keyboard us french language Is this the problem?? And thnks

[@cedricvillani8502]

No reply what a surprise lol, keep subscribing, pressing Like and Donate, there ya go

[@ad_sidera_virgines]

Hello there !

[@robert58]

What's up

[@ad_sidera_virgines]

Nothing crazy is going on here ^^

[@archimanchakraborty7772]

hey how did you add systray in xmobar

[@aserillll]

He’s using a program called “trayer” and then applets like nm-applet for network and the volumeicon applet to control volume.

[@harryvendryes]

Laptop screens are so small that I display just text (no icons). As a single user Arch machine, one should know what all those letters and numbers refer to. Saved space = more info.

[@brandonlee712]

stupid question, would this work on pop_os

[@DistroTube]

Every window manager should work on every distro.

[@brandonlee712]

@@DistroTube Thats what i thought. I must have screwed something up lol. All I get is a black screen with red outlines. *shrug* i should have read the fucking manual lol :)

[@henninb]

I prefer to use polybar in xmonad.

[@stonebeard]

early comment

[@robert58]

Good for you

[@dougtilaran3496]

RTFMP

[@manuelarias6013]

Primero = firts