Getting Started With Xmonad

In this rather lengthy video, I go over the basics of getting started with Xmonad. I install Xmonad on Ubuntu 20.04 and show some of the basics as far as configuration. I also show you how to use the Haskell documentation. And I briefly show you how to install and configure Xmobar.
OTHER XMONAD VIDEOS THAT MAY INTEREST YOU:
► • Hacking on Xmonad - Gr... - Hacking on Xmonad - GridSelect, ToggleStruts, ToggleBorders
► • Xmonad and Named Scrat... - Xmonad and Named Scratchpads
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@xtnctr]

DT changes my life for the better on a weekly basis.

[@JohnVogiakelis]

I've seen you compare tiling window managers and fell in love with the possibilities of Xmonad. Your videos are pure gold for me who's trying to get into Xmonad and some other stuff you cover. I feel both lucky and unlucky that I only recently discovered your channel. Thank you!

[@onearmadillo]

Very nice format. Not scripted, catching errors as they came. Very nice. I’ve been wanting to try xmonad for a while and this video just made the last push. Running it now on a RPi4 without a glitch.

[@Cavi587]

I really never even knew about these tiling window managers. I always used Windows and the "standard" GUI's for linux distros such as GNOME or xfce. In the last few days after finding your channel I was motivated to install arch on my VM and I've been playing with since. I have to say, tiling window managers really helped my workflow while programming. I feel like all the stuff that usually distracts me is gone. It's hard at first to get used to doing everything by yourself in config files and learning all the key bindings to control the window manager, but when you do, it becomes a really powerful tool. Thanks for these vids!

[@bumbumbumdumbumdum]

These videos are so valuable. You really made it a lot easier to take my first steps into xmonad. A few months ago I would have skipped a 42 minute video without thinking about it, but now I'm actually fairly pleased that you took the time to make it. I appreciate how you put me in a position to learn the rest on my own.

[@yourfamilytree833]

DT, thanks for your help in getting started with Xmonad. I tried Awesome for a few weeks then moved on to Xmonad. Had some config problems with Xmonad. This video is a great help in understanding Xmonad and Haskell. Xmonad is now up and running has many benefits for long time Linux user. Great video. Will follow you with with your other Xmonad videos.

[@shanethefox]

Just wanna say that I love your videos DT. You make awesome tutorials and I love learning stuff about all the ins and outs of linux!

[@AndersJackson]

I really liked that you show the process. That is most important thing in learning anything. How to find information.

[@magburner]

Thanks for this xMonad tutorial, I have installed int on my LMDE4 daily driver. It is my first time using a tiling window manager, but I am enjoying the experience so far.

[@HaiNguyen-cf1ji]

xmonad just perfect, the speed, the customize bar, reload config without restart X and the way it handle mutiple screen love it

[@zasbirrahmanzayan8648]

me too, it's perfect!

[@Brian-uq6jm]

Thanks so much for the tutorial! I'm late to the party, I write a bit of haskell, and I feel right home with this.

[@Bens963]

I ran xmonad for about 5 years, wish I had your channel back then

[@wintc]

Just subscribed! Adding this software on my new PC tonight. Thanks so much for this wonderful guide--very excited to start using xmonad

[@Jeff_Seely]

Brother, I do not know how I got along without Xmonad all these years. I am loving this window manager, particularly your configuration. I guess if I had one gripe about Xmonad I guess I would have preferred it to be written and configured in Python rather than Haskell. But it's kind of like a fun adventure to learn a little Haskell though. I'm going to make a few shuttle changes to better suit my interaction with this config but I'm going to keep most of it the same because it is so sensible. Thank you Derek for all you do 👍

[@ashishpanigrahi180]

Brilliant video as usual. Thanks DT!

[@baddealrage]

This is very satisfying when you finaly get xrandr and xmobar working. After this hudge quick start I will be able to play arround with xmonad. Can't wait to compare your final script and see how I can improve my environement.

[@GothicKin]

21:00 When you eat asparagus and drink beer non stop for a week

[@calebmullan4593]

Well played, I laughed out loud at that.

[@ganondos1888]

Why did I laugh at that…

[@dynamagon]

XD

[@DannyMexen9]

Derek, you do amazing work. Good job.

[@jhonrocha6632]

Really great video, DT.

[@SergioDanieu]

Every single video in your channel is a new world to me. I’m not even noob in linux and this kind of stuff but I really wanna learn and change my way to use my laptop. Greetings from Colombia. Thanks for this content

[@shawazonfire]

aren't we all noobs, El Sergio?

[@a2n-]

your's videos is pure gold dt !

[@asuszenfone4105]

I'm trying Xmonad on FreeBSD, where hs-xmonad-contrib is going to be taken out of the repos. Long story short I had to copy 2 files, from /usr/local/share/examples/xmonad (build & xmonad-config.cabal) to .xmonad dir. Edit .cabal file to direct to xmonad.hs, run 'cabal new-update', then run './build'. I must say I'm impressed. Thanks DT.

[@jacksonsauder8248]

first day without plasma thanks to you! thanks for the awesome content

[@gaurangshukla8235]

Did you read my mind? This is just what I needed. Thanks man.

[@defnlife1683]

I did my first install ever of Linux last week (artix with Runit & Plasma) and this is great. I'll try it out tomorrow.

[@markring40]

Great video DT! Thank you.

[@C6438911]

This is great! thanks for the video. I have a question, could you do more "getting started" video's about other various window managers? I know you made a quite a few videos, but maybe a whole new series of videos, the 2020 edition of "getting started with" or follow-ups ? Anyway, all content you create is awesome and thanks for sharing your experiences. Sorry if I ask a little too much. Whatever your next video might be, I'm looking forward to it. That's for sure! Thanks!

[@Ladministrateur]

Im french student and it’s very good tutorial / explications for Xmonad ! Thanks 👍

[@DistroTube]

Glad it was helpful!

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Drek. Saved for reference.

[@rndm_adrian3714]

Thanks! I was troubling a lot with it yesterday

[@senninscorpion]

Great video Derek! It really looks minimal, but there are a lot of dependencies for haskell. Since I don't use another haskell program, I'll stay in DWM because I'm trying to keep my packages count low.

[@antoniobarbalau1107]

Thank you for everything you do for us ♥️

[@glpzzzdev]

Hey DT! As always, thanks for your content. Just trying to make sense for myself why I would like to add 1.1GB of files to my system, just to compile the wm. This is the only thing stoping me to try xmonad again (it was the first tiling I tried in 2010 before ending in i3 back then). Good thing about dwm is that is compilable with very basic stuff. If I was a Haskell developer ok, but sadly I'm not. Anyway, I think I will give it a try in a VM. You have a point about patching suckless tools. I heavily patch mine and it gets boring in some moment.

[@krissprague7979]

Great info. Thanks for the class

[@bavneet5]

Thanks mite, because of you i started using Xmonad. I was a qtile user.

[@azechele]

Well, tbf most panels work fine with xmonad, although you might need some extra config. If you want a panel with all bells and whistles like polybar that can still seamlessly integrate with xmonad, there's taffybar for you (and it's also in haskell).

[@samwang1439]

Thanks a lot! The vid really helps me setting up my low-performance atom small laptop.

[@nekoill]

Dude... I decided to play around with Xmonad, and it turned out to be so awesome for whatever reason, I instantly decided to ditch dwm in favor of this. I don't know why, I just love it. Maybe it's because in Haskell you don't have to worry about memory management and also have access to cool high level stuff, because y'know, it's basically a lambda calculus stuff, but it's compiled into binaries in the end, but it gives a good bank for your buck as far as the performance is concerned, like it hardly requires any more CPU and memory than dwm does while also having easily applied features like opacity for Xmobar. It even got me interested in Haskell, and recently I found myself looking up tutorials on it. I used to think of it as a more "technical" programming language with highly specific area of application, but it turned out to have been used to write a way more everyday software. Looks promising as hell. Thank you so much for this discovery, and another one for your build on GitLab. It helped a lot, though I have no use for a multi-monitor setup, and I also cut out the tree select feature, but your Xmonad build proved to suit my needs the best of what I've found on the Internet. For those interested, I can also suggest a build by Haron Prime on GitHub - another interesting one, I'm currently tinkering with it and trying to incorporate features from it into my personal build. Pretty great stuff, it has clickable taskbar that almost turns the whole thing into a more efficient desktop environment, would recommend to anyone interested in pimping his build out.

[@abobader]

Nice one, well done.

[@leandroadrianpaz]

Hi Derek. I've recently discovered that like awesome, xmonad has a screen with a summary of the default keybindings by presing meta-shift-slash (M-S-/). It's not as pretty as awesome's but it's useful.

[@jonnywester3194]

Very very good video!!

[@driden1987]

following along with my Ubuntu Machine!!

[@rojaarkezor7185]

Great, so at the end of the day you built your own Desktop. Nice

[@OveRaDaMaNt]

After 2 months on awesome and 1 month on DWM, I've decided to go back to KDE. Constant messing with the config files and having to set up literally everything from scratch was too much for me.

[@_yuri]

based tyrell wellick

[@Manu-oh8gn]

@@_yuri "Old school"

[@GafftheHorse]

Oh well. At least you tried something new. I spent a lot of time trying out lots of different window managers, and was constantly reading up, fiddling, tweaking. Once I set up some autostart scripts to launch stuff I really needed and settled on a wm and a config that worked for me and was efficient, I've settled and hardly need to touch anything in over a year. Using i3-wm currently. Ocassionally I install one of the big desktops, mostly to see how they are progressing, but I always eventually go back to a basic wm. The desktops are more likely to revert any configuration changes you make to them on an update than a wm is likely to need maintenance, once you've set things up how you want.

[@ivans3806]

@@GafftheHorse judging from some tutorials on xmonad written circa 2008 with still functional dotfiles, you're kinda on the point here...

[@bbaovanc]

What matters is you tried alternatives, and found what works best for you

[@wherami]

You do put out some neat videos.

[@robertcrawford4009]

Great video. I'm staying with Awesome.

[@ruirodrigues705]

thank you so much for this video! :)

[@moai834]

Just a couple words: Installing xmonad from official repos isn't preferred, because dependancies can go out of sync and it will break. Preferred way would be building from source using statically built stack or cabal. (eg stack-static from aur) This also allows you to not having any haskell library installed from your distro pkg manager at all (welcome arch users - no hs libs bloat on updates). To use xmonad with stack - one would create shell script named "ghc" that would have something like: stack ghc -- "$@" (because xmonad looks for ghc bin, and we don't have it) ((this is probably not what users should do if they just want to try xmonad out tho ;))

[@moai834]

Yeah, using ghcup would be preferred if one would do it through cabal.

[@AndersJackson]

If it get out of sync, it is a bug and should be corrected. No need to install from source. But if you want to, nothing stoping you.

[@moai834]

The most notable is that this is not just 'building from source', as xmonad requires actual haskell 'runtime' - doing this will make sure, that every dependancy is fixed, that deps versions only change when you update xmonad itself. Issue is when repo updates ghc, while libs aren't fully up to date - such version mistmatch bug is fixed quite fast (especially considering the popularity of xmonad), but still is a bummer. But yes - this doesn't happen often, and probably won't be an issue for most of the people.

[@tomm5765]

@@moai834 my research tells me that "dependancies can go out of sync and it will break" is an Arch Linux problem, because Arch Linux dynamically links Haskell packages. It seems this is not such a big deal for Ubuntu/Debian, do you know if this is correct?

[@StannyObelisk]

A comprehensive xmonad configuration guide would be great!

[@DistroTube]

Xmonad.org and Haskell.org. A "comprehensive" guide on video would be hours...dozens of hours...in length. At some point, you have to read the documentation for yourself and figure out what you need for your particular purposes.

[@DistroTube]

That's on my "to do" list. ;)

[@VolceriDAvila]

Brilliant! Thank you!

[@abdusalam3ar]

Tiling WMs are so much fun. It's good for my wrist too, as I work on the computer all day and my wrist really hurt when switching constantly between the mouse the keyboard.

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks for sharing

[@greatestcait]

Other people: Ohhhhhh noooooooo, Haskell is so spoooooooooooky Me: Wow, this Haskell config looks so much cleaner than the Lua config that came by default with Awesome, maybe I should try Xmonad.

[@thujamagus]

Thank you for this.

[@DistroTube]

My pleasure!

[@lesscommonsense1804]

Hey DT I would love to get the wallpaper from your main desktop. Great video btw!

[@JuanEsquitin]

Thank You!!!

[@celestialadministration]

DT does magic, says it's easy. 🤣🤣🤣

[@gabrielmoura9794]

hi, i'm brazilian, how can i do the xmobar part in arch linux, i didn't find the directory where you got the standard bar file

[@apoorv9492]

hey DT, great video, it would be nice if you also made a video about showing the extra stuff needed in a TWM to make it a "better" desktop experience like notification system, policy kit, software to change customize themes, settings manager, login-logout manger, system tray, bluetooth management etc. also on a laptop will the function keys for volume, brightness airplane mode work? and what if i connect the laptop display to a external display will i be able to switch the display to be mirrored or extended? or if there is a tool to do so. i think it would be very helpful for new users as they might need these "basic" functionality. meanwhile im gonna install arch in a vm install xmonad start building a config and desktop how i want it. and once it done i will replace KDE with xmonad. been waiting for this for so long. Greetings from India Stay Safe!

[@somebody8533]

hey dt, can u have a look on velox? Its a dynamic tilling window manager running on wayland inspiered by xmonad and dwm

[@mizel_1121]

Best video for xmonad please we need next video like that what the next I don’t want to read I need you show me and tech me more about xmonad

[@donnyleebeehler5820]

Thanks DT,,

[@DistroTube]

You bet

[@xtnctr]

Let's go xmonad.

[@mr_beezlebub3985]

I might try this WM. Been using XFCE ever since I started using Linux.

[@HiAdrian]

I'm a long time Xfce user too, considering a tiling window manager (and keyboard-centered workflow) for my laptop, since the touchpad is so tedious to use.

[@apoorv9492]

Hey DT, I can't seem to find the setting for reducing gap size between windows. Can you let me know which section has that setting. My config is almost like yours a bit modified though. Thanks.

[@cailrambler4907]

Thank you

[@willpaxman5236]

There's a bug in ghc on Arch Linux ATM, downgrading give a couldn't determine version error, help!

[@NapoleonWils0n]

Hi dt, there a couple of things i think you missed out on switching from dwm to xmonad i made the switch from dwm to xmonad on the day you made the video, and these are some issue i came across + tagging a window so it appears on multiple workspaces - using copyWindow + myManageHook and getting picture in pictures in browsers to float and not to tile + does the order of the code in the xmonad.hs file matter - eg can main go anywhere + xmobar displaying updating if you dont have StdinReader in xmobarc + myDefaultLayout determines the order of your layouts - eg the first item will be the default layout on any workspace + getting videos to open in tiled at the normal size at the top of the screen without back bars as opposed to in the middle of the screen with black bars + floating windows is general I have been trying replicate tagging windows across multiple workspaces with copyWindow without any luck and i think most people switching from dwm would be interested how to get that working so you can have a video playing on all workspaces The other thing i that has me stumped is getting firefox picture in picture video to open as a floating video at the correct size - using doRectFloat ? this may just be something i have done or not done if my config This is my xmonad.hs config file after 2 days github.com/NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-dotfiles/blob/master/.xmonad/xmonad.hs In one of your video you mention getting videos to go full screen using keybindings to toggle struts i set my layout so avoidStruts groups the layouts that should avoid struts then put the the full mode outside that grouping, then you can just cycle thru the layouts and dont have to set up extra keybindings to togglestruts myLayout = avoidStruts ( monocle ||| tiled ||| grid ) ||| monocle and under where i set monocle to this monocle = smartBorders (Full) bit of check giving you xmonad tips after 2 days when you have been using it for over 10 years i know

[@agostonvolcz]

I also have started to use XMonad, with my laptop and an external monitor. I have the problem, that the xmobar is only showing on the output set as primary. How did you configure X (and XMonad) to treat your monitors as different screens? When I connect the monitor, and run xrandr, it shows "Screen 0" with both outputs. I could set it up, so that it's technically an enlarged screen, but Xmobar still won't show on both displays

[@MyurrDurr]

I remember when I used to use i3, Everytime I used the keyboard binding to reload it, all the items in the auto start section such as my Compton config got relaunched but I didn't know that so after a while I had like 80% cpu usages from the 20 or so instances of Compton running in the background

[@riseabove3082]

Not an issue on my i3 but sometimes you may need to add a kill command and then execute a new instance.

[@TheReaver2099]

Ok, We get it, you like xmonad

[@AndersJackson]

And for a good reason. 😜

[@Dariowelcome1]

Could you make a video about installing qtile on arch linux or anyother gnu/linux distribution?

[@Sean_476]

DT, I just replaced font like you did at 35:48 in 6our video. Then wrote it and did super + Q and now I have like a super imposed xmobqr on top of another one with the larger font under the normal one. Any idea what happened there??

[@lightcfu8913]

Press shift key and plus sign on your numpad [ + ] to increase or [ - ] to decrease font size in xterm. You can also start another xterm by typing the command " xterm -fa 'Monospace' -fs 72 &" -fs 72 means font size 72, and -fs 36 means font size 36 Try " xterm -fa 'Serif' -fs 24 -bg navy & " to change both the font, size and background color at the same time Another way is Ctrl and right mouse button to show the menu and select VT font size.

[@unclefreddy2009]

Love these videos. Would be great if they were a little more concise perhaps a walkthrough of the essential things to change rather than interactive debugging. Either way you have introduced me to lots of cool tools

[@singletona082]

Hey Hex? Any thoughts on the gimini web protocol? I'm technically on the mailing list but like... the discussio ngoes over my head and i find it hard to focus.

[@user-um9qf2pn3v]

Maybe it's my machine's problem, but I had issues with recompiling xmonad on manjaro for about three days now. As I understood, pacman breaks some dependencies and nothing seemed to work. If you have similar problem, try to delete xmonad and xmonad-contrib from pacman, install cabal-install and then run "cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib --lib --ghc-option=-dynamic" and after that install them with pacman. I didn't find similar solution online and I am not sure if it's the right way to fix this, but now xmonad runs smoothly, so I hope that helps

[@YoutubeChannel-gg3hf]

Hey DT. i rly loooooooveeeeeee ur xmobar. Is there anyway i can use that with bspwm? if yes then how?

[@parhelik5403]

Not into Window Managers myself but it looks a hell of a lot more hackable than DWM. Patches are so 1989... think Bon Jovi and denim jackets.

[@gokulswami7665]

I don't think so, awesome window manager is proof that dwm is super hackable, it's a fork of it

the handle that is coming back from `spawnPipe` is not a handle to the process but to the input (the stdin for that pipe) - that's why the `hPutStrLn` will write to it - I'd rename that variables (xmproc1,...) to something more telling

[@vizlodunken4952]

DT❤️

[@DN-ij8ki]

How do i change my keyboard layout in xmonad?

[@hyunsooshin3631]

Thanks for the great tutorial. I have one question. As you explained, incorrect code would be detected when we type `window + q`. However, some of errors cannot be detected. For example, If I type the `myTerminal = gnome-terminal2' and restart the xmonad by typing `window + q`. The xmonad instance successfully have restarted, but now new window keybinding does not work because I had a typo against the program name. In that case, I thought that I should be able to see some xmonad logs. I found that there's seems no such a log file location. How can I inspect these kind of errors? Thank you.

[@TeaJayOne]

Is it possible to put xmobar into the start hook?

[@SMOKE3104]

I have a huge problem when installing xmonad... really almost any window manager I try to use on my laptop. I have a 3000x2000 resolution and when it is installed, everything looks extremely spaced out and small. I would like to increase the visual look of things by 150% to 200%. Has anyone had this issue and found a way around it or anyone just knows how to solve it? Thinkyou for any help that is provided.

[@kdemetter]

5:03 In case anyone has a similar issue : on my keyboard, the mod key wasn't linked to my Alt key, instead it was linked to my windows key.

[@cadetriestocode]

What is better awesome wm or xmonad? They almost seem like mirror images of eachother just written in different languages. Is this the case, is it more a choice of Lua vs haskell?

[@DannyMexen9]

Quick question, and I apologize for making comparisons. In Luke's video, dwm had a feature for making a window prominent either by opening it or focusing on it. Can xmonad do that? Thanks.

[@DannyMexen9]

This is so much better, I read the template config file. Turns out I can swap the master window. Much better than doing this automatically. Thank you so much for this video. I have had a wonderful time configuring xmonad.

[@vonBottorff]

I've got an installation of Haskell stack right now on my Ubuntu 21.04/Gnome. It's using ghc 8.10 maybe? What's going on behind the scenes when I do a sudo apt-get install xmonad? Does installing xmonad set up and work with a completely different Haskell environment -- or does it work with my existing Haskell stack world? Haskell install is bizarre, and I'm afraid of messing stuff up. Just found a rogue stack.yaml file that was completely messing me up, and had to completely re-install stack. Fretful of XMonad for that reason.

[@Silly_Werewolf]

i watched 18 minutes of this in 0.75 and thought he was drunk

[@smitdev]

LMFAO I JUST DID IT

[@4nyNoob]

I know it's me but i just wanted to switch workspaces with my numpad, i know that it's more ergonomic and all to use the number row, and all but I like my numpad, i'm so used to setting it up like this in KDE that i always loose myself when trying out tiling window managers

[@xGshikamaru]

can you have some graphs on xmobar using cairo or something like that to display memory usage as a progressbar instead of a number ? That’s what I love most about awesome, its cairo integration, you could for instance display a progressbar of the song you’re playing in your music player to see how far into it you are

[@xGshikamaru]

answering myself, it looks like XMonad.Util.Rectangle is just what I’m looking for

[@redgeoblaze3752]

Well I only just switched to BSPWM a week ago, and I've been enjoying it very much, but yeah, I might as well start looking into a new one. I don't see no ring. This is Linux, I've got 8 DEs and WMs on my system right now.

[@jamesleimer2527]

i dont know if this has been stated in here but when i entered mod4mask to change left alt to windows key it didnt work..still using left alt. im on asus laptop X551m, sorry it was set to mod4mask instead of mod4Mask

[@Finkelfunk]

39:19 When you forget to pull up your pants after taking a leak

[@sunilsharma-yy1lk]

I am installing xmonad on manjaro kde but after installing both packages when I am trying to log back in via xmonad it's just seems to stuck there. Any advice?

[@pwndumb2903]

Anyone knows how use "command" key in Mac keyboard as a super key in xmonad ?

[@romankuksin4990]

2:54 libghc-xmonad-contrib-dev is installed automatically as a xmonad dependency

[@Casper-bj6po]

Hi DT, How did you get started on Linux? I know you used windows way back, So what made you go over to Linux? Thank you for a great chanel, and for doing your best to get new users to Linux. I am a newbie myself and i hope i will be able to dump windows all together, But i have discovered it gets harder and harder to learn new stuff, the older you get.

[@riseabove3082]

He's explained this on one of his previous videos before.

[@YavorBachev]

If you use ubuntu, you probably don't want to spend days in learning and configuring tiling, but you don't have to! Use ShellTile extension and you have a great tiling for ubuntu - all windows are not tiled by default when opened, few easy shortcuts to tile what you want. Easy tiling only when needed for lazy ubuntu users like me