My dotfiles aren’t anything too special. I’ve had a few Haskell enthusiasts come by and clone / checkout my xmonad configurations, which has been kind of cool – and also kind of awkward.
XMonad has been serving me extremely well as a window manager, and my productivity in coding has never been higher since switching to a tiling window manager. However, I sadly do not get to do much Haskell in my spare time – with Scala becoming the functional language of choice for me (mostly due to it being a viable alternative to Java, which I’ve been trying to get pushed in at work for a while now.) As such, my Haskell’ing skills never really got to grow, on top of a lot of the xmonad configuration stuff really being it’s own special API in some ways (which is fine, just need the time to learn it).
So some astute amongst you will have noticed this post tagged with bspwm. So, yes, I am making the transition over to bspwm.
Why
While xmonad has been amazing for coding productivity, getting it to play nicely with video games has always been something of a nightmare. I’m going to place the blame for this squarely on my own configuration, but I could not figure out how to solve the following: when having a full screen video game open, and switching desktops, the game window expanded in size, no longer fitting the native resolution.
Weird, eh?
There had been a lot of talk over on /r/unixporn about bspwm, so with some frustration over not really being able to play DoTA2 for the last ~year+ (I no longer own any windows machines, or duel boot), I decided to give bspwm a go, and see if it fixed my fullscreen woes.
The switch
I installed bspwm-git and sxhkd-git from the AUR,
copied the example configuration provided in the bspwm repository, updated my xinitrc to
comment out the xmonad launch and put in sxhkd and bspwm, and restarted X. (The hotkeys
for sxhkd I did modify / borrow from some other configs to make them more like the ones
I had been using in xmonad).
First impressions – fucking awesome. Solved the window bleeding issue I was having with xmonad as described above. Window splitting felt more natural then it did on xmonad, and toggling fullscreen applications was also a lot cleaner looking.
Second impressions – multi monitor support is not on par with xmonad. This is somwhat annoying, and I’ll follow up with some kind of fix to this once I figure it out.
Conclusion
XMonad still feels more flexible and powerful to me. If I had more time to play with the configuration, and was using Haskell on a more day-day operation, I highly doubt I would be switching.
bswpm is fast, small, sleek and works very well out of the box. I look forward to making it behave like xmonad does ;)