New highlights:

• The application pager now uses icons
• Per application configuration.
• Minimize windows by using special workspaces

Note that I have converted my Colemak key bindings to Qwerty to give an idea of the placement I use. Also note that this work is not finished. There are still lot of things I want to behave differently, and I need to do some cleanup here and there.

Still, I hope you can get inspired by some of my ideas. Enjoy

• Whole config (incl. icons)

• xmonad.hs (html)
• App.hs (html)
• BorderColors.hs (html)
• Commands.hs (html)
• Config.hs (html)
• DMenu.hs (html)
• IM.hs
• Layout.hs (html)
• MyApps.hs (html)
• Pager.hs (html)
• Panel.hs (html)
• Utils.hs (html)
• Workspace.hs (html)

Related posts:

1. XMonad config (July 2009)
2. Fvwm config of August 2008

If you use many web applications like GMail and Remember the Milk, you may want to get access to them using a single key binding. In Firefox you can use the following snippet together with the Keyconfig extension to

• cycle between all tabs matching the regular expression re
• if no tab matches, open a new tab showing url

function openOrCycle(url, re) {
    var wm = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1"]
        .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIWindowMediator);
    var browserEnumerator = wm.getEnumerator("navigator:browser");

    // Check each browser instance for our URL
    var found = false;
    while (!found && browserEnumerator.hasMoreElements()) {
        var browserWin = browserEnumerator.getNext();
        var tabbrowser = browserWin.gBrowser;

        // Check each tab of this browser instance
        var numTabs = tabbrowser.browsers.length;
        var currentIndex = tabbrowser.tabContainer.selectedIndex;
        var nextIndex = (currentIndex + 1) % numTabs;
        for (var index = nextIndex;
             index != currentIndex;
             index = (index + 1) % numTabs) {
            var currentBrowser = tabbrowser.getBrowserAtIndex(index);
            if (re.test(currentBrowser.currentURI.spec)) {

                // The URL is already opened. Select this tab.
                tabbrowser.selectedTab = tabbrowser
                    .tabContainer
                    .childNodes[index];

                // Focus *this* browser-window
                browserWin.focus();

                found = true;
                break;
            }
        }
    }

    if (!found &&
        re.test(tabbrowser
            .getBrowserAtIndex(currentIndex)
            .currentURI.spec)) {

        // The URL is already opened. Select this tab.
        tabbrowser.selectedTab = tabbrowser
            .tabContainer
            .childNodes[currentIndex];

        // Focus *this* browser-window
        browserWin.focus();
        found = true;
    }

    // Our URL isn't open. Open it now.
    if (!found) {
        var recentWindow = wm.getMostRecentWindow("navigator:browser");
        if (recentWindow) {
            // Use an existing browser window
            if (window._content.document.location.href == "about:blank") {
                window._content.document.location.href = url;
                window._content.focus();
            } else {
                recentWindow.delayedOpenTab(url, null, null, null, null);
            }
        }
        else {
            // No browser windows are open, so open a new one.
            window.open(url);
        }
    }
}

openOrCycle("https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox",
            /https?:\/\/mail\.google\.com/);

The snippet is based on examples from MDC.

Using Xmonad and Prism

If you use Xmonad and want very fast access to tasks like sending a mail, checking your calendar or marking a todo-item as completed, you may consider using Prism. You can assign a key binding in Xmonad to bring focus to a given Prism window – check out the WindowGo and NamedScratchpad modules.

Unfortunately the only thing distinguishing Prism windows  is the window title, so we need to force the title to stay fixed using a Greasemonkey script. You will need Teramako’s Greasemonkey build for Prism to do this, and something like the following:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           title-gmail
// @namespace      mntnoe.com
// @include        *
// ==/UserScript==

document.title="Gmail";

Note that some web applications will update the title dynamically, so you may need to adjust your predicate to account for that. For instance, GMail will update the title to “Gmail – Inbox (3) – foo@gmail.com”, so our predicate will read

className =? "Prism" <&&> fmap ("Gmail" `isPrefixOf`) title

It is a hack, but it works quite well

My complete solution is based on NamedScratchpad and makes sure that only one Prism window is shown at a time, enabling you to switch fast between web applications. I will post it together with my current Xmonad setup when I get time.

Related posts:

1. Being productive in GMail using ItsAllText

• Labeled pager addon for DynamicLog
• Fast navigation between workspaces
• Application specific border colors
• Modified Scratchpad using GNU Screen
• Host specific settings (layouts and widgets)

To use these modules, you must put them in ~/.xmonad and then reenable support for user modules in your xmonad source. Simply look for a line in Core.hs containing runProces “ghc” ["--make", "xmonad.hs" ...] and remove the “-i” entry from the list. This switch was unfortunately added to fix a bug on case insensitive file systems. Note that a solution is under development, placing user modules in ~/.xmonad/lib, thus solving the issue with case insensitive systems, see issue 230.

I will try to make some darcs patches for xmonad-contrib if I get time. Until then, I hope you can get inspired by some of my ideas. Enjoy

• xmonad.hs (html)
• xmonad_qwerty.hs (html)
• BorderColors.hs (html)
• DMenu.hs (html)
• Dzen.hs (html)
• Layout.hs (html)
• Obsolete.hs (html)
• Pager.hs (html)
• ScratchpadPrime.hs (html)
• ServerMode.hs (html)
• Util.hs (html)

Related posts:

1. XMonad config (May 2010)