Tech Life of Recht

As some might know, at Trifork, we’re like Scrum quite a lot – just about everybody at the company is a certified ScrumMaster (mostly certified by Jeff Sutherland). Now you can also get the World Tour T-shirt, which is nice in itself, but guess who’s doing (half of) the modeling? You guessed it! That’s me on the picture, and no, I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. One can only wonder why I was picked…

I’ve looked at it a couple of times, but hadn’t really had the courage to make the switch completely. What I’m talking about is xmonad, one of the smallest and simplest window managers available. I’m not sure it’s still under 500 lines of Haskell, but it’s still pretty impressive.
The concept is not new: Windows are managed completely by xmonad by tiling. This means that there is no overlapping, and there is fill keyboard control. Furthermore, it supports Xinerama, although it takes a little getting used to.
Xmonad fits right into how I think window managers should be: Simple and out of your face. The only eyecandy is a statusbar at the top of one of the screens (which you have to configure and enable yourself), and most people probably wouldn’t quite call it eyecandy – it actually just displays the text output of any command. I’ve never actually used concepts such as a desktop or manipulating the filesystem through some obscure file explorer, so I’m not really missing anything. The only thing that bothers me is that some programs are not quite designed for tiling. Mplayer is probably the best example, it doesn’t really make sense when the Mplayer window is tiled into a 1:2 format. Work is in progress to make a floating layer so that special windows can be managed outside the tiling. Until then, I’ll just have to live without Mplayer.