Sunday, December 14, 2008

XMonad with Ubuntu, dvorak, Pidgin and Skype

The last two days I have been playing around with XMonad, a tiling window manager for X, written in my favourite language Haskell. I now have a setup that is to my liking. It is intended for Ubuntu, using the dvorak keyboard layout, with key bindings that are a mixture of Gnome and XMonad default bindings.

The thing that I'm most proud of, however, is that I made a customized version of XMonad.Layout.IM that allows for multiple buddy lists. The buddy lists from Skype and Pidgin are placed on the right side of the F10 workspace, while chat windows are automatically placed in the remaining area.

I realize that the target audience (Ubuntu users, typing on dvorak, interested in alternative window managers, and using Pidgin and Skype) may be quite small, but in case my configuration file, or parts of it, are useful to somebody, I put it on the Haskell wiki.

This requires XMonad 0.8 or above. This version is in Ubuntu Intrepid. Ubuntu Hardy ships with an old version, so there you will need to install XMonad by hand.