xmonad-decoration-ex

This repository contains code for advanced window decorations mechanism for XMonad.

What this is

This set of modules contains a set of type classes and their implementations which define a flexible and extensible mechanism of window decorations.

Within this mechanism, there are the following entities which define how decorations will look and work:

Main object is DecorationEx layout modifier. It is from where everyting starts. It creates, shows and hides decoration windows (rectangles) when needed. It is parametrized with decoration geometry, decoration engine and theme. It calls these components to do their part of work.
DecorationGeometry defines where decoration rectangles should be placed. For example, standard horizontal bar above each window; or tab bar.
DecorationEngine defines how decorations look and how they react on clicks. Different implementations of decoration engine can use different API to draw decorations. Within this package, there is one implementation (TextDecoration), which uses plain Xlib calls, and displays decoration widgets with text fragments, like [X] or [_]. Other engines can, for example, use Cairo library to draw nice gradients and image-based widgets.
Decoration widget is an element placed on window decoration. It defines how it looks and how it responds to clicks. Examples include usual window buttons (minimize, maximize, close), window icon, window title.
Decoration theme defines colors and fonts for decoration engine. It also contains a list of decoration widgets and says where to place them (at the left, at the right or in the center).

This mechanism makes a huge use of parametrized data types and type families, in order to make it possible to define different types of decorations, and easily combine different aspects of decorations. For example, each decoration engine can be combined with each decoration geometry.

See haddock documentation for more details.

Current state

The code from this repo have been merged into xmonad-contrib repository.

The code will remain here for historical purposes. All issues are to be reported to xmonad-contrib issue tracker.

Usage

In your xmonad.hs, write something like

import XMonad.Layout.DecorationEx

myTheme = ThemeEx {...}

myLayout = textDecoration shrinkText myTheme (layoutHook def)

main = xmonad def { layoutHook = myLayout }

Cairo decorations

This whole mechanism was implemented with idea of making decorations more fancy and nicely looking, that what we currently have in xmonad-contrib. That is hard to implement with plain Xlib calls. I was considering different graphics libraries and their Haskell bindings, and for now I ended up with cairo library.

So, currently there is xmonad-decoration-cairo repository, which uses xmonad-decoration-ex as a base to draw fancy decorations with cairo library.

License