xmonad-light 0.8 Released

Following the recent release of xmonad 0.8, xmonad-light has a 0.8 version out. This version of xmonad-light is built against the xmonad 0.8 release version. The binary (i686) distribution can be downloaded here.

New Features

As I said in my previous post, I have implemented ManageDocks. Also implemented is defaultKeys, which can be set to False to ignore the default key bindings and define them all yourself.

The --to-haskell command-line option will output Haskell code for an xmonad.hs equivalent to your xmonad.conf.

Binary Distributions

The binary distributions do not require GHC or xmonad to already be installed.

They include a README describing usage and xmonad.conf syntax, an INSTALL file, and a TODO with future improvements. I duplicate these below.

Distro Packages

The whole point of xmonad-light is to lower the bar to trying out xmonad by removing the GHC dependency and making it much more lightweight. Anyone looking to package xmonad-light for their distro is invited and encouraged to do so. Comment on this post or email me if you need my support with any part of it.

Future Features

In no particular order:

• An xmonad-like restart system that keeps running with the current configuration on a restart that fails to compile the xmonad.hs or parse the xmonad.conf.
• xmessage error popups and use of the ~/.xmonad/xmonad.errors file.
• logHook support, for output to dzen and xmobar.
• more layouts and other contrib modules

I will be working on all of these, but patches are always welcome.

Bugs

There are almost certainly bugs in xmonad-light. I have been testing it, of course, but I haven’t really used it. Real use by actual users will, I’m sure, expose some bugs. Emails to the xmonad mailing list with bugs and feature requests will come to my attention, and I will endeavour to fix them or implement them.

Comments

Any comments, suggestions, gripes, “it would be nice if”, or other such are definitely welcome.

Contributing

Throughout this post I say “me”. I’m the sole developer of the xmonad-light project only by circumstance and not by desire. I would welcome any patches, and if you want to hack away on xmonad-light you’re most welcome. If you think I’m doing it all wrong, come to #xmonad or the xmonad mailing list and say so!