Explaining Everything In My XMonad Config

i've been getting a lot of questions recently about xmo nad because i haven't made a video about the x moment ad telling window manager in a while and i've made a lot of videos about it in the past so if you guys are interested you're just now starting with x monet or maybe you're just now starting with tiling window managers in general go check out some of those older videos that i've done on exmonet they'll really help but today what i wanted to do was i wanted to show you guys my current configuration file because i'm always tweaking things in my xml net can fix i'm going to go through my very massive xmo.net config file and i'm going to break down every section of my config file and explain exactly what those little snippets of code do so let me switch over to the desktop here of course this is xmonet if i opened a few terminals here you can see that's the standard master and stack layout there in xmo ned the panel at the top is xmobar now let me go over my config i'm going to go over my config section by section and show you guys exactly what's going on uh how i get all the effects and everything that i want in my xmonet and hopefully you guys can glean a little information and take parts of my config that you guys may want uh throw away the parts that you don't want so let me open up doom emacs and i'm going to open up my xml ad config and my exmonet config is normally a literate config it is a uh an org document so it's going to have a lot of comments and everything now your nad config is just going to be a haskell file so your exponent config is actually going to be xmonet.hs it's going to be in your home directory slash dot xmonad slash xmonet.hs and that's just a haskell document the org document is the same as just i have comments this is the only thing writing it as an org file here in emacs it's a little cleaner and easier to read so i just wanted to explain the difference why my xml ad config may look a little bit different because i'm going to have bullet points and everything just ignore those yours is just going to be nothing but straight haskell of course so going over a little bit of my xmonet config here the very first section of your config is likely going to be a section of imports this is where you import various exmonet contrib libraries let me zoom in here a little bit so we can better read some of this so when you install xmonet typically you install two programs to install xmlnet you install xmonet which is the base window manager with the base packages it's very small like smo nad is a very minimal kind of window manager very suckless even though it's not a success program but you also need to install xmonet dash contrib what is this this is a set of extra modules that you probably are going to want most of these modules are what are actually being imported in my config these are these extra third-party modules in the x-moned contrib package that allow you to extend x-moned in some ways that you can't with the base package so if i go over to the browser here and this is what you guys need to do i i would bookmark this page this is from haskell.org they have a search engine called hackage that you can look up various haskell modules and things like that and i'm looking up x-moned-contrib i will link to this page in the show description but x-moned-contrib is the third-party extensions for x-modem so again when you install x-moned you also need to install x-monet dash contrib and if i go through the documentation here we have modules and there are i don't know probably 100 of them it's a very long list of modules and these modules are what you end up importing here in your config you see you know things like import xmlned.actions.copywindow and if i got into my xmonet contrib documentation here exmonet actions dot copy window right there for some reason i needed this particular module what does it do it provides bindings to duplicate a window on multiple workspaces providing dwm like tagging functionality so i actually don't use this i added it to my config file probably because somebody else needed it at some point you know i've got a lot of people hey x mode ad doesn't work like dwm how do i do this x mode add doesn't work like awesome how do i do that you know x monad doesn't work like i3 how do i do this so i do have a lot of extra stuff in my config file that i don't actually use but anyway this is what you do you go in here and find all these third-party modules that do you know whatever it is that you need to get done in your xmode config and then you import those modules so that is the import section here and i've got a lot of things imported in mind i'm actually going to scroll back up to the imports because i do want to just briefly cover what some of the various uh imported modules due not specifically but the sections for example we have uh import and then xmonet.actions.name of module so these are various action modules for example the copy window kill one that's to kill a window with a key binding is what that is move to shift to next screen previous screen these are actions that you do on windows to move them amongst different workspaces you know swap between different monitors and things like that so that's the actions modules and then you have a data section here and this is where i do things like import data dot char so data characters is space and two upper i know two upper is a module that basically takes a string of characters and makes it uppercase so i know what that one is so we have the hooks section here this is import exmoned.hooks.name of module and these are typically hooks related to xmobar especially such as the dynamic log hook these are things that we're going to use for our x mobile config xmonet.hooks.managedocs is another very important one because that includes modules for doing things like avoid struts avoid struts is the reason the window does not cover up the xml bar panel so that's avoiding struts toggle struts is toggling on that functionality so i have a key binding in my xmode config where if i do super enter i actually turn off the avoid struts so it toggles the struts right meaning my window no longer respects that there's a panel on the screen right it just takes up the full screen real estate 100 uh it also toggles off the border so that's a different uh module that i've imported so i have that key binding that toggles struts and turns off borders and if i toggle it again of course i get back into the the normal avoid struts where it respects the screen real estate at the top that should be occupied by xmobile the next section of imported modules is xmonet.layout.name of module and these of course are layouts so grid variance grid so that's for the grid layout so if i open up a second window here i'm going to open up four windows and if i do super tab on my config changes the layouts and if i get to this one here this is the grid layout and i have that grid layout because i imported that grid module there and then xmonad.layout.simplestfloat is a floating layout spiral resizable tile tab i have a tab to layout three columns i have a three columned layout where everything is in three columns dividing the screen vertically i also have this section of what i call layout modifiers these aren't necessarily layouts but these modify layouts so for example the uh no borders layout here so i showed you that you know i can get rid of the borders by hitting super enter it toggles struts and it does the no borders command actually does two things when i do that command that's not a layout in itself no borders but it is a modifier to any layout i can actually make any layout toggle on and off no borders if i want to also under the layout modifiers i have xmonet.layout.show w name that's show workspace name and this is an interesting little bling effect so right now i'm on workspace 2 which is www workspace 3 is called sys let me go to workspace 3 so i'm going to do super 3 on the keyboard and you see in the center of the screen it told me what workspace i just went to let me go back to workspace 2 super too and it tells me www i just went back to the www workspace now uh that's a really neat kind of effect is it that useful no because i mean i have a panel at the top of the screen i never not know what workspace i'm on but it is a really neat effect scrolling down a little bit i also have imported a lot of exmonad prompts prompts for example for man page for pass that's the unix pass store we have a shell prompt ssh prompt a unicode prompt and the exmonad prompt which is a prompt that gives me x monad con commands so what are xml ad prompts well let me do super shift enter in my config brings up a run prompt and this is just a standard run prompt if i wanted to run alacrity for example i just start typing ala and if i hit enter you know it opens up my alacrity terminal that is the standard run prompt now if i wanted to show you some of these other prompts if i do super p followed by a m this is the man page prompt if i wanted the man page for the ls command you know i could type ls and hit enter and get a man page pop up for ls the ssh prompt is just ssh into remote servers the unicode prompt is to search through unicode characters for emojis and then have it copied to a clipboard and the exmonad prompt again is exmonad commands so if i do super p followed by x this is the exmonet prompt and you can see it's viewing workspaces shifting to different workspaces killing xmonet restarting x-monet you know it's x-monet's specific commands in that particular prompt now scrolling down a little further i have a section in my config i call variables this is just setting variables that you're going to use later in your config file if you have a string of characters that appears many many times in your config for example my key bindings and my key bindings i have key bindings for a lot of terminal based applications matter of fact let me go down to the bottom of my config to my keybindings and i will show you some of this so these are my key bindings and let me find some that involve my terminal ah right here for example super enter mod return spawns my terminal plus plus e fish so it launches my terminal and then launches the fish shell it looks like uh super alt h launches my terminal and then it launches h top so let me try that super alt h and it launches my terminal and then h-stop within my terminal and i've got a lot of these commands that involve my terminal so let me get back uh to the top here to my variables and i have a variable that i set called my terminal and i set it to equal alacrity why did i do that well if i have a dozen different key bindings in my config that involve a terminal and what if i change my default terminal what if a month from now i no longer want to use alacrity as my standard default terminal maybe i want to switch to urxvt well instead of having to go change a dozen different key bindings and changing alacrity a dozen different times in those key bindings since i use this variable in those key bindings my terminal all i have to do is change this one variable and you know right then and there you know if i save and restart x monet all those key bindings now are using x u r x v t as the terminal rather than alacrity it just saves you from having to change a ton of lines later now i actually don't want to use ursvt because i don't even have it installed so i'm going to go back to allegrity i have a lot of key bindings that also involve my browser so i set my browser to be cute browser and my cute browser binding is cute browser with a space behind it because these key bindings that i will use cute browser will be cute browser space and then name of website you know url of website and you need a space somewhere you either need that space to be at the end of cube browser in the variable or just remember in the key bindings themselves to add a space uh in the appropriate spot but you do need to make sure when you do these variables if it involves the terminal and the browser and then some extra information some other arguments make sure you place uh the space in the correct places some other things i said i set a variable for my font my emoji font i set variables for normal color focus color border width uh the key that i want to be the mod key should be somewhere in here it's right here it's mod mask my mod mask equals mod 4 mask that sets the mod key to be the super key i also set alt mask to be mod 1 mask so alt mass means it's the alt key so any key binding or anything that refers to alt mask actually refers to the alt key i could change that of course to some other key if i wanted the next section of my config is the auto start section so i have this here my startup hook equals do and then after do i have spawn once name a program spawn once name a program spawn once name a program basically a command to run and this is where i put all the programs that i want to automatically start as soon as x monad starts so when x monad starts up i want lx session to run that's you know the session manager i want that to run in the background i also want to spawn once nitrogen dash dash restore that sets my wallpaper because if i don't have something that sets my wallpaper as soon as i log into x-monad i'm just going to have a black background then i spawn once picom picom is the compositor i spawn once uh trayer trayer is the system tray here at the end of xmobar that's actually a separate program from exmobar it's a completely separate program so that's trayer and then within the system tray trayer i have network manager applet volume icon i also auto start the emacs daemon because i used emacs client as my editor and if you're going to use emacs client you have to have the emac server running the emax name and running so i how do i accomplish that well i just put it in my startup hook here in exmoned i also have a couple of demons that i've commented out in haskell to do a comment you do two dashes i used to use the cacoon editor and i used to start cacoon as a daemon i also have urx vtd that's the urx vt terminal daemon i no longer use ursvt because i use alacrity but if i did use ur xvt i would definitely use the daemon running in the background the next section of my config is called grid select now grid select is interesting it's this interesting little effect that let me show you guys grid select so that is grid select it's just a grid of programs that i have set i i guess you could call it almost like quick launcher kind of programs instead of doing it the traditional way where you have quick launchers maybe with icons sitting in a panel that you could click on in exmonet if you wanted you know some kind of quick launcher kind of applet i would probably just use this grid select menu and you could do the vm keys h j k l or up down left right if you could use the arrow keys for example if i wanted to i could scroll over here to uh dead beef if i wanted to and i could launch my dead beef music player it looks like i was listening to heart's greatest hits the last time i was listening to something in dead beef now my grit select config gets a little deep very detailed here i'm not going to cover everything in my grid select but you guys can check that out on your own the next section similar to grid select there is a feature called tree select it's a tree menu so in my config if i do control t followed by t this is my tree select menu and i could use the vim keys to navigate down and i could go i don't know into bookmarks here into linux into arch linux and then finally go to the archwiki and hit enter and this should launch i i should have launched uh cute browser but it looks like cube browser has an error i haven't actually run cute browser in a couple of weeks i'm assuming what has happened is cute browser probably has had an update recently and their update broke my config.pi which is the config file for cute browser so i need to investigate that issue but again the tree select menu is this really neat tree kind of menu if i go through here and i go to multimedia and i go down to uh vlc i don't think i have vlc installed do i yes i do all right so i can launch programs i can go through i can set bookmarks in the tree select menu you can add anything you want to to the tree select menu here it's pretty self-explanatory i have a ton of stuff in my tree select i'm not going to go over all the tree select settings you guys can investigate that further if you're interested grid select and tree select they're kind of cool but they're probably not something that most people are going to want in their config so i'm not going to spend a ton of time on that i will spend some time on the xmo.net prompts so i showed you where you import the various xmonet prompts the modules you're going to use this is setting some settings for those props things like what do i want the color to be the foreground color the background color what do i want the font to be i want the font to be my font remember i set a variable at the top of my config for setting my font that saves me from having to type that very long string you know xft colon name of font and all of that i just set a variable one time and anytime i need to call upon that font i just set it to my font so that's one of the reasons why i have that particular variable but you guys can check out these uh they're called xp configs for x prompt configs i called mine dt xp config because i changed some things from the default xp config i have a section here called custom prompts these are x prompts but these are custom props now i'm not a haskell master i don't know much about haskell i know enough to hack on my ex monad config but basically i found these snippets of haskell somewhere probably on stack overflow right so this calc prompt if i do super p c for calculator i have this calculator prompt here where i could do something like two plus two and hit enter and it says 2 plus 2 equals 4 and then i get another prompt and then i could do i don't know how about 4 times 4 and 4 times 4 equals 16 and then of course i get the prompt again and that is achieved by this little bit of haskell code here of course i had to import the exmonet prompt module but after that it's really just a few lines of haskell made that happen that this particular calculator prompt uses a program called calculate dash gtk so you do have to have that installed on the system if you're going to use this calculator prompt i also have this edit prompt here and this is just a way for me to get a run prompt type a path to a file and it will open in emacs it's not a very useful prompt it's just me playing around with trying to figure out how xmode ad prompts work so i'm actually not going to spend time talking about that but i left it in the config here just in case you guys want to investigate it because maybe you want to see how the code works that's why i left it there in case i ever want to come back and try to figure out how to create my own custom xml net prompts that's really the only reason i have the calculator prompt or the edit prompt here it's just for educational purposes x prompt key map are key bindings that work when you're inside one of these you know x prompts so anytime you launch one of the xmonet run prompts or ssh prompts or anything these key bindings should work within those prompts i have a search engine section to my config where i can search various search engines so this lengthy list right here is all the search engines that are available for me to search from directly from an exmonet prompt so i have this this list of search engines and most of these search engines are built into an xmln contrib module called i believe it's xmonet.actions but i wanted to add some that were not part of that module and you can see right here i have these six search engines here i added these these were not part of the module but i wanted to add them so i have these lines here and then down here where i have the complete search engine list the ones that begin with a capital s such as s dot dot go those were the ones that were already built into the module the ones that don't begin with s dot such as this archwiki search engine right here that was one of the custom ones that i added to see these search prompts in action what you want to do in my config i have super s followed by a key and the key that you need to hit will depend on which search engines for example archwiki the key is a go the key is d i hope that makes sense so if i do super s a we can search the archwiki i can search for i don't know flatpak and it should open the flat pack page from the archwiki inside uh cube browser but again my cute browser config may be broken so uh now that i think about it recently i did change my web browser my default web browser on my system it's always been firefox and recently i removed firefox from my machine and it still may be set as my default browser so that may be what these key bindings are trying to find it's trying to find firefox and it's no longer on my system i this video is going to run very long so just very briefly i do want to cover uh three really important sections of my config that's the layouts the key bindings and then the actual main section of the config so the layouts this is where i define of course the layouts that i use such as the default tall layout which i'm in now which is the master and stack layout but if i do super tab i can go through a bunch of different layouts let me open some windows so you can see this is the master and stack layout this is a magnify layout where whichever window has focus it zooms itself in really neat little layout this is the monocle layout so full screen everything's stacked on top of each other full screen but it does leave room for the bar at the top and then this is the floating layout so all the windows float now i could grab them with the mouse and move them around this is the tab layout you can see we have tabs at the top here of course you can use the mouse to click on the tabs you can also use the keyboard to navigate through the tabs and then i have a grid layout i have the spiral layout where if i kept opening windows you know things would just keep spiraling around and then i have the three column layout which is three columns it's a master and stack three columns where the first column is a little bigger than the other two columns and then three row layout is similar to three columns and then finally master and stack again the tall layout and you can see i've defined all those layouts here in this section i also have these lines here about spacing the my spacing and then the my spacing prime here this is how i get gaps around the windows i'm just setting specific numbers for the pixel size of gaps i want around the windows in each different layout for example in the tall layout the master and stack layout i have my spacing 8 that's setting the spacing around the windows to be 8 pixels scrolling down past the layout section i have the show window name the workspace name that is and this is where i set the font size and the colors for that neat effect that i get when i switch workspaces where you get the the workspace name here and then we get to the actual workspaces themselves i've set the workspace names dev www assist doc v box chat muse vid graphics and those are the nine workspaces here in xmode bar they are clickable i can actually click on them with the mouse if i wanted to i sometimes forget that those things are clickable because most of the time of course you're going to use the keyboard of course to you know switch workspaces and this is a section that i've cleaned up a bit recently this section used to be quite a bit bigger i used to have two different sections one for non-clickable workspaces and one for clickable workspaces depending on which one you want to use i can condensed it down though into just having clickable workspaces and i've made the code a little cleaner too this code was actually suggested from somebody over on my gitlab they opened up an issue and actually gave me a little bit cleaner haskell here to get that clickable workspace effect and with the names not really being affected because before the code i was using the names for the workspaces that appeared on the screen were really long because the names of the workspaces were this here action equals x do tool key super plus plus because that's the actual workspace you can see clickable workspace equals and so that's the workspace name well he gave me this code here where it changes the workspace names from this action here the clickable action you know clicking on the workspaces to the actual names so i really appreciate that i should have went to my git lab and got that guy's name that left me that code but i really appreciate the tip there manage hook here this is setting window rules for example when i open up firefox which is no longer on my system it automatically opens up firefox on workspace too the code remember in programming typically everything starts at zero so if you have uh ten workspaces it's zero through nine not one through ten so do shift my workspace uh exclamation point exclamation point one is actually sending firefox to workspace 2 because workspace 1 would actually be 0. i hope that makes sense so that's how the manage hook section works for giving you some window rules as far as what workspaces they appear and what layout they appear whether they're floating or what have you the key bindings section is pretty self-explanatory i have my keys home equals and then this very long list of key bindings and you can see what the key bindings are the capital m is the mod key that's the super key capital s is shift capital m1 is alt capital c is control and i am using the easy key bindings here in my config so if i go back to the top and go to import and somewhere in import i believe utils import xmed.util.easyconfig that is how you get the easy config key bindings rather than the standard key bindings the standard keybindings in xmonet look something like this instead of capital m for the mod key it's actually modium right and instead of capital c for control it's control mask capital s for shift is really shift mask yeah that's a lot of tedious writing well if you import the exmoned util easy config module and then you know you can go in your config and change all of those rather lengthy uh shift mass control mask mod m and all of that to just capital m or capital c capital s what have you and then finally the last section of my config is the main this is where everything that i put previously in the config comes together this is your main block you have main equals do and then it executes all of this code and all of this code is basically all the the sections from earlier in the config i have these three sections here xm proc for xmobar process because i have three different xml bar processes going on i have three monitors and i have three different configs for each of my three x mode bars because i've got different widgets on each of them i hope that makes sense so that's why i have three different xm procs there in xm proc i could have named that anything and just made sense xmobar process01n2 and then after i set that then we have this block here x monet dollar symbol and i have ewmh def def stands for defaults and then i have this opening brace and then later i'll have an ending brace and everything in between that brace and that brace is really your xmode ad config this is everything that it all comes together right here and this is where you tell it uh mod mask equals my mod mask that's the variable i set before so mod mask equals the super key terminal equals my terminal again alacrity is what i said startup hook equals the my startup hook section from earlier that's all the auto start programs layout hook equals the show workspace name and then my layout hook there's a section earlier my config called my layout hook it so all the window rules and everything workspaces equals the my workspaces section from earlier in my config you guys get the idea and then later we've got log hook log hook is where all the xmo bar stuff comes together so that is this section here and in between these braces here you have all of these statements that begin with pp this is a pretty printing uh libraries here is basically what this is pp output is hey what output is getting outputted into the xmo bar well we're getting output from xm proc 0 xm proc 1 and xm proc 2 my three different x mobile configs that i set earlier and i set exactly what monitors they're on zero one and two for monitors one two and three pp current is the x mode bar uh color config for the current workspace i'm on in exmo war so right now i'm on workspace 2 www and it's this green color and then pp visible is the exmo bar workspace color for visible workspaces so workspaces i have on other monitors not my current monitor so i can see them and so that's workspace one which is the div oh i shouldn't have clicked it i forgot these are clickable workspaces so one and eight are visible workspaces because they're on my first and third monitors i hope that makes sense and pp hidden is the workspaces that are not currently viewed on any of my monitors and they are colored purple because i set that right here in the color here and of course this clickable part makes those workspaces clickable that's why i can click on them and it will actually take me to those workspaces so i have all these xmobar settings here and at the end additional keys and this is where it's setting all of my key bindings remember i had the list of key bindings well actually all of that goes right here at the end of the main equals do block it just makes things easier though instead of having this massive main equals do block you break everything down into sections like key bindings and layouts and workspaces and then you just call upon them here by saying hey terminal equals and then my terminal because you set a variable for it workspaces equals my workspaces because you set that block of workspaces earlier in the config it just makes things a little cleaner so that was just a little bit of my exmonad config some things have changed since the last time i made a video but for the most part about 95 percent of that config is exactly the way it was before xmo nad has really been my preferred window manager for most of my desktop linux experience since for since i switched to desktop linux back in 2008 i spent most of my time in standalone window managers almost 100 of my time as a desktop linux user i've been a window manager user done some floating window managers like open box love open box spent years playing around in open box and fluxbox and things like that but early early on when i switched to linux one of the very first window managers i ever tried was x-moned and it's one i keep coming back to because it's just so dang good i know the config for xmo.net can be tough especially for newer users but i hope seeing me go through my config and breaking some things down and tell you exactly what some of that code is doing i hope that makes things a little easier obviously i can't completely spoon feed you as far as you know i i can't tell you how to do things that i don't do but i often get people asking me support kinds of questions hey i want my window manager to do this how do i do it and it's not something that i do in my config obviously so i would have to go and learn it myself and figure out how to configure to somebody else's liking to help them i'm not going to do that at some point you do have to do some of the heavy lifting yourself but from this video and some of my past videos i really think i've done enough that you guys probably can figure out exactly how to get xmo nad set up now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode i need to thank absie dallas gay blue mitchell allen akami architect 5530 chuck david the other david dilling gregory lewis paul scott west and willie they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon they are the producers of this episode i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names are seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because the distrotube channel does not have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you would like to support my work look for dt over on patreon alright guys peace you