I've heard excellent reports of xmonad, but how good is it for everyday use and for development? For various reasons I don't use vim/emacs (though I don't suffer from terminal-phobia!). All the screenshots/videos I've seen show xmonad being used with mainly terminal apps. Is it worth switching from KDE 4.2?
A:
I think it depends on the person. Is Linux worth switching to from OS X for everyone? No. It depends on various factors. As for switching to xmonad completely (I understand you can run both), it will depend on people's preferred style of workspaces. Personally, I have switched over and I just wished I had tried it earlier. Anyway, the best thing you can do to see if its for you is to go ahead and install and run the dam thing! :) Hope that helps.
fuentesjr
2009-02-21 00:48:26
+3
A:
KDE is a desktop environment - a collection of well integrated applications. XMonad is a window manager, which only replaces KWin from KDE, so you can still use KDE while using XMonad (and other window managers).
A tiling window manager is usually used for productivity reasons. Vi and Emacs are used for the same reasons. This is probably why you commonly see people using a lot of terminals and vi/emacs in screenshots. There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to use graphical applications with a tiling window manager. However there are various quirks with some applications (GIMP comes to mind), where dialog boxes and various windows don't play well with the tiling paradigm, because the developers didn't think of it. They basically assume that the window will float. There are ways to fix this, by setting specific windows to be floating, but it may take some time to configure this, and it may be annoying at first.
Tiling window managers tend to have various layouts. As far as I know all tiling window managers have a "fullscreen" layout. This would probably be a nice layout for an IDE, and possibly even other graphical applications (I use it for web browsing). Layouts can be set per-workspace in XMonad, so you could have an "IDE" workspace and have specific settings for that environment.
I suggest you just try it, there's no harm in it, and you'll be able to judge for yourself.
sebnow
2009-02-21 04:16:46
A:
This is probably what you want: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_KDE
My experience: I like xmonad but wanted to live in the magical land of gnome I followed http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome
which just worked. IIRC all I need to do (on ubuntu) was to *install xmonad *create .gnomerc *put WINDOW_MANAGER=xmonad *put import XMonad.Config.Gnome in my .xmonad
I get all the magic of gnome in a tiling organized way
rev
2009-06-20 01:05:05