XMonad Demo

[@soundscape3065]

I couldn't pay attention to your demonstration because I was too busy drooling over that keyboard

[@emanoelnascimento9496]

I never knew I needed this desktop setup before I watched this. Just wonderful.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks!

[@foehammer2127]

Me Niether

[@Alex-ce1ol]

This is one of the most well thought out tiling window manager workflows I've ever seen. This is what people mean when they say TWMs are better for productivity. Also, your demo workspace wouldn't look out of place in the background of a set on The Orville. Brilliant work

[@Archwyrm]

This is very neat. Thank you for taking the time to share in such detail! I've been using an XMonad config that is close to the stock config for many years but I see quite a few things here that could potentially improve my efficiency. A good video says a lot more than a screenshot of a complex config paired with text.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks. I'm hoping to simplify the code a bit more and hope to do another video once I do some further revision.

[@termog3847]

😅😅😅😮😅❤😢😮😅😅❤😅 шш😅😮😮😅😅

[@knwr]

I have been using bspwm for a year (the only one i've tried) and really liked the idea of scripting control over configuration files because I could usually 'hack' a behavior in if I spent enough time thinking about it. Some things I could not do however--like combining windows into a grouped setup like you showed here. Combined with the scratchpad, I think I'm sold. It looks like you can customize the division pattern of the windows as more open too. I suppose when you're modifying the executable you can pretty much do whatever. Gonna have to get a new setup going and learn some haskell. edit: didn't finish the video before posting. The different layouts and especially the screen dependent layouts are pretty damn cool.

[@bittertruth6575]

This is one of the most amazing and awe inspiring ways of working I have ever seen! I mean coming from a windows background I would never have imagined anything close to this being possible on a pc. i think when Richard Stallman talks about freedom for users, I think this is what he is talking about. USERS UNLEASHED!

[@michaelvivirito]

Bitter Truth that’s what drew me to Linux haha

[@hcjorgensen]

Hey Ethan, Whenever you switch workspaces, you have the name of the workspace you switched to pop up very briefly in a window with a black background and white text and then disappear. Also, the window seems sized to fit the workspace name and use a custom font. I would love if you could give me any hint as to how this is done.

[@Cross-fr8st]

Video that made me install xmonad! Really liked your setup, very creative

[@jlmg3543]

I love that bar on top of the active window.

[@sumanth3036]

This video never gets old

[@sleepymario9657]

Hello, may I ask what font you are using in your terminal? It looks great.

[@neilclay5835]

Loving the 2001 like three-letter acronyms that pop up on workspace switch. 7 years later, what you using now?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Good eye! I think this was peak window management for me. I switched to i3 at one point, then Sway, but lately I'm on macOS for daily desktop use (eternally testing various tiling solutions on it all of which are subpar in comparison to xmonad).

[@helgegudmundsen5361]

Thank you so much for sharing your Xmonad setup like this, I got a ton of useful information from the video and from your (very well documented) config files. This is the third of your ideas that I am copying. Solarized is used in all my terminals and editors, and I used Kinkless back in the day (now I am using org-mode in Emacs - Solarized of course). The idea of the xcape/xkb to make additional modifiers was a real eye-opener, and paved the way for many other keyboard customizations that I now use.

[@PaladinJenkis]

Brilliant, not quite my way to do this since I got used to i3 but something I will keep in mind when feeling like changing something. Thanks a lot

[@babylfsh]

Dammit. Now I have to change my mod keys again! How could you do this to me?

[@MrApplewine]

What keyboard is that? Is the white fox? I wanted to order that but it was never available so I got the MagicForce.

[@EthanSchoonover]

I own a whitefox but that isn't it. That's a leopold fc660m case, gutted and rebuilt with a clueboard PCB and custom springs in mx black switches.

[@MereddynYT]

What is the name of the browser extension you are using to navigate webpages with key strokes only?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Might have been cVim in this video chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojhcghmfjfneahoeklbjjh?hl=en though there might be different or newer extensions that do the same thing that have come out since... cVim seems pretty good still.

[@madjestic]

Hey, Ethan That's a very neat setup! What video recording / screen capturing software are you using? What's under the hood? Is that OSX or Linux? Thanks for sharing!

[@EthanSchoonover]

ffmpeg for screen capture. pitivi was the video editor in this case, if I remember correctly. This is all on Arch Linux.

[@renatod.o.2930]

I really liked the idea of having a chromium work / personal instance, planing to move to Arch Linux and using xmonad, can you point me to a good learning source for monad? that horizontal black strip showing the keys u just pressed when using the shortcuts, does it comes by default or any coded is needed? btw nice colored keyboard, did u bought like that or painted it urself?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Everything is more or less available on the Arch Linux wiki. wiki.archlinux.org However you can pull off the work/personal trick on other operating systems. I've implemented a similar (though not quite as flexible) system on macOS. It's just a matter of the chrome command line. The application I use to show the on screen keys is call screenkey: aur.archlinux.org/packages/screenkey/ Keyboard is a custom set. Hand built board, keycaps are called Penumbra, but not longer manufactured.

[@nevork7578]

This is incredible

[@ianpan0102]

Which keyboard are you using?

[@marcovirtual]

When you change workspaces and it's name appear in big fonts, is that an xmonad native feature? That looks really cool.

[@stephenseefeld8462]

wish you made more content.. your so clear and well spoken and very good at imparting information. Did you ever make the video on how to do the fancy duel-use keys? I checked the github but last commit was 4 years ago : ( If you are still into linux you should start making more vids if you want.. I am sure they would find an audience.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks Stephen! I don't think I ever posted that video though there is some sample code in my repo. It made use of xcape (github.com/alols/xcape) to achieve most of the dual use keys. later I built some hardware keyboards that did the same thing but the xcape solution was more generally useful. I've had to migrate off Linux as my daily driver due to some key applications I use but I miss xmonad all the time. My favorite WM by far.

[@teinteamarre5546]

Really nice! Plus, when watching your video, your solarized environment is in harmony with mine : )

[@jdhoehler]

You are a genius, and present well to boot! I've been using i3 for a few months now but am considering switching to Xmonad. As someone who has used both, what do you think are the greatest advantahes? Also, is Xmonad difficult to configure without any previous knowledge of Haskell?.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks! Honestly I think the world of i3. It's a really well put together out-of-the-box experience and does 80% of what I need. Even some of the "advanced" XMonad stuff could be done in i3 with the right shell scripts. xdotool, wmctrl are both excellent utilities for this type of thing. For example you could probably more or less simulate the named-scratch-pad functionality through some shell scripting. I was new to Haskell when I started to first use XMonad. I'd love to use Haskell for everything, honestly. I love functional programming and it's a beautiful language. I am terrible at it right now but I'm sure I can improve and XMonad certainly gives me opportunity to do that. My own xmonad config is very much a cut and paste job from other configs I've found, so don't feel bad taking that approach either. Start with a clean, simple xmonad.hs and slowly add stuff, trying to make sure you more or less understand each piece you are adding.

[@frosch03]

really impressive configuration! one question, what keyboard do you use?

[@EthanSchoonover]

It's the shell of a Leopold FC660M that I gutted. I kept the plate but put a clueboard PCB in with new switches. Penumbra (Solarized) keyset, of course.

[@nosage]

Awesome! What mx switches did you go with?

[@EthanSchoonover]

nosage black, some clear, all custom replacement springs

[@ICopiedJohnOswald]

Great video. Do you have any problems remapping your Tab key using xkb and xcape together? My Tab key is getting triggered twice when pressed on its own.

[@ICopiedJohnOswald]

I think i accidentally had two instances of xcape running, I'm not sure but the problem seems to have gone away. :) I'm launching xcape from .xprofile but it looks like you wrote a systemd service for it. That seems like a better solution. Your dotfiles are remarkably well documented!

[@EthanSchoonover]

thanks! I could do a better job in them... it's as much for me forgetting what I did as anything. glad you got the xcape situation sorted. it's a funny method we're using but I like the results.

[@ICopiedJohnOswald]

Yeah it is a funny work around get it going, but I don't think i could go back. Tab and backslash as super keys is too amazing. I want to implement some more features from your setup, but my haskell-foo is really weak and I don't want to include code if I can't follow exactly what its doing. However, learning haskell is a huge priority for me right now and I hope to make it a primary language in the future.

[@ElderSnake90]

Great video, love the time you take to show it off and in such detail. Also nice to see yet another person who's obviously a big Alien fan :p I've been tempted lately to set up a minimalistic tiling-wm (lots to choose from I know) with a retro Alien kind of theme, like the movies have with the green cathode display kind of thing. This is coming from someone who uses GNOME 3 daily though, so who knows if I'll ever get around to it xD

[@EthanSchoonover]

I like Gnome 3 and used it for at least a year, and still run it on some machines. It was only because I'd used XMonad before that I really knew I wanted to do another build out. Great thing about Gnome 3, at least on Arch, is that it mostly just works without fussing. I occasionally bring up cool-retro-term for a classic Mother-esque UI.

[@PaulosTegegn]

This is amazing! I was mainstream Ubuntu desktop user. Thanks to your video, now I am Xmonad hardcore user.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Paulos, that is awesome to hear!

[@BradleyADavis]

This is so great. I really love the solarized colors everywhere. I hope you do more videos.

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks man. Definitely going to do more now that I have the workflow setup.

[@BradleyADavis]

I love your work man. Just wanted to give a huge shoutout for solarized. It is so essential for me. I want to learn xmonad and after looking there are not very many good tutorials about how to get started. There's a great opportunity there for video content. Thanks!

[@EthanSchoonover]

Thanks. I agree about the XMonad content. A lot of old stuff but not much in the way of how to. We'll see if I can add more.

[@BradleyADavis]

What OS are you using? What are you using for your menubar? I really like all the solarized information up there. Can you give some information about you set your environment up? Do you still use a terminal multiplexer with xmonad?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Arch Linux as distro, xmobar for menubar. I don't really use a multiplexer since XMonad more or less serves the same purpose. I do use tmux and mosh when connecting to servers, but not for the multiplexing as much as for session persistence. xmobar config is here: github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/blob/master/.xmonad/xmobar.conf utilities I use for status are status-* here: github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/tree/master/bin/wm

[@JoshuaDeGagne]

Very cool! I've been on the edge of using xmonad for a while now and this pushed me over 😝

[@EthanSchoonover]

It can be a gauntlet, but if done well I think it's worth it. I left XMonad for a couple years when I broke a config (which was poorly constructed admittedly). This was a "from scratch" rework and I'm very glad I did it.

[@IvanMalison]

Wow I'm surprised that you left over something as fixable as a broken config. It seems like you switched to i3wm. Why do you think so many people seem to prefer i3wm to XMonad? Do you think that is has any real advantages over xmonad?

[@EthanSchoonover]

well, look at it like this: my config was broken during an xmonad / haskell upgrade. If you've worked with haskell, you know the dependency hell that existed(exists). It can be tricky to resolve. It's not just a config that broke, it was my haskell stack. Anyone running a system like this has to continually evaluate: is this really worth my time? will it break and cost me time (which is ultimately money)? i3 has the advantage that it just works. It's a good tiling wm and I recommend it. XMonad is simply more advanced, but also trickier to manage.

[@IvanMalison]

Yeah, I guess I've been frustrated with haskell tooling before, but it has never been something that I haven't been able to fix. You can now build xmonad using stack which should mostly alleviate any issues that you might face. Unrelated: Have you tried taffybar yet? It's wayyy nicer than xmobar, and I recently made a pull request to solve the multi-monitor problem. I've also added icons and much better workspace switcher support imgur.com/a/kH6T4

[@EthanSchoonover]

Yes, I like taffybar and have tried it many times. I tend to hit a wall trying to customize it (just not good enough at haskell, probably) and it was lacking a few modules that I wanted. Also, yeah, the multimonitor issue. If you've addressed that in your pr, i may revisit it.

[@merulox]

I'm beyond impressed I'd been using plasma with the argument that a combo of mouse and keyboard is just as good as keyboard only... Yeah... Now I'm back to being a TWM enthusiast I only started using linux ~2 months ago and I'm not too familiar with config files in general, but I'll try to maintain my own xmonad config from now on

[@cmplstofB]

Oh! It seems more useful than i3-wm (that I'm using now) in the point of configuration.

[@AxWarhawk]

Nice setup, thanks for sharing your config. Much appreciated!

[@Sra4825]

Is there any chance you could re-share the dotfiles? You'd be doing a huge favour.

[@EthanSchoonover]

No problem. Done. To be honest I had forgotten that this was the repo I'd linked to (thought I'd linked to a gist). I may migrate that repo in future but now I'll remember that this video's links need to be updated as well! github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm

[@Sra4825]

@@EthanSchoonover Thanks a ton for the link, I have been trying my hardes but cannot figure out how to set up the magical keyboard layout you have.

[@radekjanik2657]

Is there a way to use this resolution agnostically?

[@EthanSchoonover]

It is resolution independent (xmonad window placement and layout is separate from the desktop resolution)

[@radekjanik2657]

Ethan Schoonover much appreciated thank you, I tried it and it didn’t automatically resize as some of the settings are based on the 1920 resolution as far as I noticed. On another note do you have any plans to engineer other Color schemes as awesome as the solarised one?

[@EduardoAdameSalles]

I've been using dwm in the past months and it's really great as a window manager. I use dwm-blocks and it really sucks, but is the best I've found to my setup. It was really hard to put it to work with emotions - I can't even have click events. My only fear of leaving dwm is that I'ma teacher, and when I share the screen, I can select windows that are on a different tag (workspace), and I couldn't do it in others wm (as i3, openbox, bspwm). And the integration in two monitors (that I don't have in my daily setup, but sometimes I connect the notebook to the tv to watch something, or when the presential classes come back I'll have to do slide presentations, so it's important to me to have a adaptative dual-monitor setup). Can someone explain to me if there's a better wm (in this case XMONAD) in questions of bar and its clickable events, that also has nice behavior with streaming windows and dual-monitor?

[@EthanSchoonover]

I've used xmonad in classroom and with presenting, but you really have to dial things in yourself to be comfortable and confident in the output switching, etc. I wrote my own display management code for that (just shell scripts mostly, easy enough).

[@pedroribeiro3266]

Where can I find keycaps like yours? They're gorgeous

[@davidwiedemann9926]

Ever found them?

[@gnuemacs1166]

What keyboard is that ?

[@andrewhuang6232]

i have installed the xmonad within my arch linux. when i enter into xmonad , how could i open a terminal by default?

[@jahor]

Superkey+Shift+Enter But keep in mind that it will spawn terminal defined in your xmonad.hs and it will be something like urxvt.

[@liquidpromo]

I see you like the alien franchise.

[@yiannisspanos694]

Wait. What key have you mapped as escape?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Using the ~` key as escape when tapped. When pressed with shift it produces a ~ tilde. FN+ that key produces a backtick `. You can set this up in software or hardware. Currently I do it in hardware via custom keyboard firmware.

[@yiannisspanos694]

@@EthanSchoonover Thanks for the reply! I was looking in to custom keyboards and I know how programmable they are, but I wanted to ask how you personally do it. My logitech G810 feels huge and heavy sometimes. Especially sometimes that I need to carry it with me.

[@fuanka1724]

This is really cool. Thanks for the demonstration.

[@MidoriLetsPlay]

Super cool setup!

[@antonchevychalov3626]

nostromo! I have the same name for my PC during last 15 years.

[@rundownvids7085]

thanks ...i have used xmonad for past few years..but very basic std layout .it is just so fast...i normally just have lots of workspaces and full screen which i tab through and a couple of split screens. i am going to try and implement your layout and the tabbing of a few terminals..that is excellent..thank you very much. may even try to get your video thing implemented. the only thing i dont yet understand is....why doesnt everyone use a simple tiling manager..they are so much more efficient.

[@xtnctr]

Watching for 5th time. You should be very proud of this project, man. Congrats.

[@bjrnsen7398]

This is awesome but there's no way I could give up ctrl-l to clear the terminal

[@dustinswan]

This is amazing! Nice work.

[@astrochelonian]

This is crazy brilliant. Thanks!

[@douglas7656]

Awesome on the tab being a hyper modifier, I might add that into my i3 configuration

[@thisisamerica7490]

Bem bacana esse gerenciador, parabéns pelo vídeo!!

[@jhonrocha6632]

Kkkkklll mds, outro br aqui! Com ctz ele não deve entender pt

[@michaelvivirito]

Beautiful setup

[@LambOfDemyelination]

00:00 => Hi! I'm `GNU'... Walk you through my xmonad configuration.

[@friedrichdergroe9664]

Has anyone made use of XMonad on multiple monitors? I was thinking of doing i3, but XMonad looks pretty cool as well. Currently using KDE, which handles multiple monitors in a good fashion, but for full-on development, KDE is a bit of an overkill, and I can never seem to keep that pesky system bar from popping up when I don't want it to. If you use XMonad on a multiple monitor setup, I would like th hear from you!

[@no.no.4680]

Multi-monitor support is one of xmonad's best features. Each screen gets one of xmonad's 10 workspaces. You can either change focus to a monitor, or change focus to a different workspace on the current monitor. The monitor gets remapped to the target workspace when you change focus. If you change one monitor to focus on a workspace that another monitor already has, then it swaps those two monitors' workspaces.

[@viktorhabchak470]

You just made me want to switch to xmonad, even though I'm clueless when it comes to Haskell.

[@macgeek21]

whats with the funky keyboard? looks like something from the 80s.

[@soundscape3065]

it's one of those custom made mechanical keyboards

[@icarius13oo]

Inspiring demo, thanks for sharing!

[@walid7885]

Very sophisticated. I am not sure I can replicate this in Emacs (which where I live)

[@kiranbhanushali7069]

Great video. Can u tell how can i install and configure like yours.

[@gavinvales8928]

pure magic. i'm finally ready to level up from i3

[@EthanSchoonover]

i3 is a great WM as well and I've used it. It's great for a "works out of the box" experience. No doubt xmonad is pure power, though.

[@gavinvales8928]

​@@EthanSchoonover yes, basically as soon as i started using linux i went straight to i3. it works so well for newbies, but these days i find my self still manually changing my layouts. i3 is getting too finicky for me. So i've been deciding over which to get, dwm or xmonad (maybe even herbstluftwm), because of the dynamic layouts and relatively easy extensibility. Thanks for the inspiration Ethan!

[@kiranbhanushali7069]

i can only full screen any window . cant split

[@makroalt5028]

r/MechanicalKeyboards approves

[@runthomas]

what keyboard is that

[@EthanSchoonover]

Custom built. Originally was a Leopold FC-660M. Gutted it, kept the steel plate, put a new Clueboard PCB in, customized all the springs in some (mostly) cherry mx-black switches. Key caps are based on my Solarized colorscheme.

[@shaidsk2578]

We need full explanation about this configuration file. Please sir.🙏🏻 It's just awesome 😍❤️

[@vpetevotov]

Such a beautiful video. I'll try xmonad instead of i3

[@DeonDSilva]

No Colemak?

[@VincentVetsch]

Very nice setup.

[@ABHISHEKSINGH-nv1se]

Do you still use xmonad??? 🤔

[@EthanSchoonover]

I would if I was still on desktop Linux full time. I love using xmonad but I have to spend a lot of time on macos due to my heavy use of adobe suite. And to be honest while I love desktop linux it was very much a greater time commitment to keep it running smoothly (my servers are all still linux of course :)

[@chintan357]

this is crazy :)

[@Amaraticando]

Nice workflow.

[@angelojulioth3616]

Holy shit, I need to try Xmonad, hopefully, I'll even do some modding since I'm learning Haskell

[@angelojulioth3616]

watching this video it's like watching someone do tricks with emacs for the first time

[@jean-baptistedelabroise5391]

It's very nice, but the time you have to put to configure all of this is tremendous

[@StannyObelisk]

Xmonad is so difficult to configure :(

[@ezio934]

Yeah I just switched today. I am very bad at reading documentation for pretty much anything. I thought this would be a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone.

[@NdLv-gm3tc]

this is amazing man!!! please.. could you make a tutorial on how to set the "sub-modifier"?

[@EthanSchoonover]

Submaps: xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Actions-Submap.html though much easier with EZConfig: xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Util-EZConfig.html (you just do something like "M-s a" / "M-s b" with EZConfig to make a submap under Mod-S).

[@NdLv-gm3tc]

I made a mistake... I meant how can I set the "pseudo-modifier" ( tab and backslash ) with xkb and Xcape. Thanks in advance.

[@EthanSchoonover]

You're right that it probably needs a good demo. I want to refine my configuration so that it's more of a one script installation, but if you want to try it before I get to it, you can take a look at the init-keyboard script which does most of the heavy lifting. github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/blob/master/bin/wm/init-keyboard There is also a systemd user service I'm running: github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/blob/master/.config/systemd/user/xcape.service I see *occasional* failure of the systemd service to run, so I want to troubleshoot that and refine the main script before I release a demo, but it should be enough to get you started.

[@EthanSchoonover]

I want to clean up and streamline my approach before I do a better demo of how to set up those modifiers, but you could take a look at the following script to see how I'm doing things now. There is a systemd user service as well. It still has some occasional failures (immediately remedied by re-running init-keyboard) that I need to run down and eliminate. Check out the script: github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/blob/master/bin/wm/init-keyboard and this service: github.com/altercation/dotfiles-tilingwm/blob/master/.config/systemd/user/xcape.service (there is also a udev rule which is commented in the first script as a sample).

[@NdLv-gm3tc]

Thank you so much. I've tried to add this to my personal .xkb config key { [ Hyper_L, Hyper_L ] }; key { [ Hyper_R, Hyper_R ] }; key { [ Tab, ISO_Left_Tab ] }; key { [ backslash, bar ] };" and then I've manually run xcape -e "Hyper_L=Tab;Hyper_R=backslash" and it's working like a charm. There is only one thing that doesn't work in my config, I remapped the "MENU" key to "L_SHIFT" and it works fine.. but if I try to use "TAB + MENU" in order to do "SUPER + SHIFT" it doesn't work. Do you know how can I make this to work properly?? Here is my xkb config gist.github.com/N4d4/b5ffff07f26ff20014bca2efe50dad35 Hope it was clear

[@code8860]

Yeah, quite good! Still I prefer i3, and I use tmux a lot. I normally open a terminal with tmux, and browsers in another desktop.

[@IgorDimitrov]

aren't you the solarized guy?

[@SergeRibalchenko]

Oh, man. Xkb is good as long as it is not integrated into your lovely systemd blob.

[@jeandelinux259]

Wow