Emacs & XMonad

I’ve started using [XMonad] 1 as my window manager, but I’ve had to jump through a few hoops to get it playing nicely with [Emacs] 2. They both use the idea of a “mod” key for their keyboard shortcuts; for example “mod+j” switches to the next window in XMonad, and “mod+x” opens an Emacs command prompt. The trouble is, they both define mod to be the Alt key by default!

This is simple enough to change, by making a configuration file called ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs. Mine contains the following:

import XMonad

main = xmonad defaultConfig
         { modMask = mod4Mask
         }

Restarting XMonad with Alt+q will load this new configuration file. However, it turns out that 1) You need the ghc-xmonad-dev package installed in order to compile against XMonad, otherwise you get an error with the “import XMonad” line even though you can import XMonad in GHCi! 2) You can’t use the GNU gold linker, or you’ll get an “unknown option” error. Uninstall the binutils-gold package if you have it.

Now the above configuration works, and XMonad is using the Super (“windows”) key instead of Alt :)

PS: The reason I’ve started to use a tiling window manager is because I’ve now got 2 huge widescreen monitors at work. I’ve rotated them both to be portrait, but there’s too much “screen real estate” (I hate that phrase) to keep traversing with a mouse. After trying a few tiling window managers for micro$oft windows (boo :( ) I’ve found [Python Windows Tiler] 3 to be the most reliable, and it works just like XMonad :)

PPS: Don’t worry, I’ve not sold out completely. Even though my machine at work has to run a proprietary OS, I only use it as a dumb terminal to a RedHat Enterprise Linux server, using [Cygwin/X] 4 over [SSH] 5 to display the graphics locally ;)