My XMonad config

This is my xmonad config, I use this same config on a laptop (with tablet mode) and desktop (with 2 screens) so it is designed to be more dynamic than some others - however this is very unstable just because I am still exporing and learning new things.

I mainly use this to explore different things you can do with xmonad and cool stuff you can do as well as learning Haskell.

Cool features

• xmonadctl is included with custom commands found in Server.hs
• The config is split over modules (Not well but still) to make it easier to read and understand
• Generalised way communication between your dock and xmonad so its not limited to one. (However you may have to have a script to convert it to the different formats)
• ScratchPads :)
• Autorotation: for screens that have a larger height than width, the layout auto rotates to accommodate the change.
• key bindings are stored in a separate json file so you don't have to recompile and restart the server when you change a key binding

My current setup

• Font: FiraCode / FontAwesome
• Bar: Eww (specifically my branch)
  • This currently writes to files in json format which can be then read by other programs to get the workspace names etc
• Application switcher: Rofi
• Terminal: Kitty
• Browser: Firefox
• Backgrounds: feh (via start_brackground wrapper script)
• Compositor: picom
• Lockscreen: xsecurelock
• Notifications: Dunst
• Other applications mentioned in config:
  • Spotify
  • Discord
  • Signal
  • Gimp
  • Thunderbird

Current plan

This is just a rough plan as I don't actively work on this unless its broken or I want to lean about something

• Move more information to config files (maybe not json files... but probably going to be json)
• Improve the xmonadctl experience
  • I kinda want to add pipes so I don't have to write to files for the bar communication

Install guide

This is for void linux but can be translated to work with arch

Dependencies

Normally I install haskell through ghcup (definitely recommended for this project) but you will need the following packages for stack to work properly:

sudo xbps-install \
  git gmp-devel iana-etc zlib gmp libffi libnuma 

xmonad should also be installed (or you can probably just copy the binaries to /usr/bin or /bin manually)

I currently don't use void linux so I can't test this out

sudo xbps-install \
  libX11-devel \
  libXScrnSaver-devel \
  libXft-devel \
  libXinerama-devel \
  libXrandr-devel

You should then be able to run:

stack install

You can also copy the xmonad desktop file:

sudo cp xmonad.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/

Recommendations

For your .xprofile, I recommend adding:

export PATH="$HOME/.ghcup/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

This is so that xmonad can find all the binary files

Developing

If you are wanting HLS to work, the current GHC version is locked on 9.4.8 for this project (stack will automatically download). But you will have to make sure you have a version of HLS which works with this - currently the latest should work but this could change so please check this page