dotfiles VS libxo

For me launching Gnome with xmonad as the window manager stopped working a few years ago. Instead I have xmonad set to autostart 2 seconds into a desktop session with --replace set. dotfiles

With regards to 1, I've got a system that works pretty well for me. You can look in my dotfiles and the script called setup-xmonad.sh. I've configured things to run xmonad --replace shortly after the desktop comes up and that works great.

> xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome

That's not really true. I use the gnome-flashback sesson and have an .desktop in ~/.config/autostart that runs xmonad --replace after I log in. It's true that logging in with a gnome session using xmonad as the WM isn't really an option any more but switching to xmonad after login continues to work great and is easier to set up than creating your own session ever was.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad...

I wasn't able to get those instructions to work on more recent versions of Ubuntu. In my dotfiles and setup repo I've got a solution that works for me using autostart and xmonad --replace.

Yes, there's stuff that you can't get just from parsing the man page too, but it's a huge help. I know it's not done every startup, I have running that as part of my "update everything" script.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/mupdate.sh

I've been using XMonad for over 10 years now. Originally I went with Awesome but then decided I liked still having a normal desktop environment and XMonad's integration with Gnome was really easy.

The way I've done this has changed a bit over the years, these days I drop a file in .config/autostart letting xmonad replace the normal window manager after Gnome gets itself sorted out.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles

Hmm, I don't use a vertical panel so it might not be comparable. My dotfiles are here though if you want to take a look.

> In FreeBSD, this problem was solved with libxo[0]:

Libxo happens to be in the base system, but it is generally available:

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

* https://libxo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Or make it flexible:

> libxo - A Library for Generating Text, XML, JSON, and HTML Output

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

Want structure? Ask for JSON or XML and parse. Otherwise it's the regular text output.

Can you trust it? Cli tool output is not exactly stable. I thought that's why libxo exists?

https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

Please consider https://github.com/Juniper/libxo or something even better than that.

That would look a lot like FreeBSD. Many of the FreeBSD userland tools are set up to use the excellent libxo (https://github.com/Juniper/libxo) to allow the user's choice of how things are output.