After several years with awesome I switched to xmonad to try something new. And I love it. In my humble opinion it is much more awesome than awesome itself. But thats a matter of taste.
My configuration creates 18 workspaces in two rows. You can use Win+[1-9] to use the first row and Win+F[1-9] for the second one. You can also use Win+[Up|Down|Left|Right] to move between workspaces in this grid.
This configuration does not provide a statusbar like xmobar or dzen2, instead the complete space is used by your windows. But it should be easy to add a statusbar, just check the xmonad website or other example configurations.
I also don't use a tray. If you need one you could try trayer or stalonetray.
I use the keybinding Win+s to access information that is usually provided by a statusbar or a tray. It spawns a dmenu with some shortcuts. Check ~/.xmonad/data/bin/menu for more information.
- xmonad (0.11)
- xmonad-contrib (0.11.2)
You don't need them to use my configuration but some keybindings and scripts depend on them.
- dmenu - a great menu to run commands
- i3lock - used to lock my screen
- urxvt - a terminal emulator
- terminator - a terminal emulator with support for tabs and tiling
- geany - a small graphical editor
- pcmanfm - a graphical file browser
- autorandr - automatic save and restore for monitor setups
- feh - set a desktop background
- scrot - a screenshot utility
- imagemagick - command line tool to manipulate images
- xcompmgr - composition manager for transparency
pacman -S xmonad xmonad-contrib
cd
mv .xmonad .xmonad.bck
git clone https://github.com/ekeih/xmonad.hs.git .xmonad
- Edit ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs. Set confHomeDir = "/home/ekeih/" to your home directory.
- Adjust confTerminal if necessary.
- Explore the xmonad.hs file and scripts in ~/.xmonad/data/bin/ and adjust paths and stuff to your needs.
- Configure your loginmanager to start xmonad at login.
- Logout.
- Login.
- Press Win+Return to open a terminal.
If you never used a slim window manager before it will be some kind of shock. But give it a try. Over time it will give you an incredible customized configuration that fits your workflow better than every traditional environment could ever do.