I recently read a post on Hacker News about Bluetile, a branch of XMonad that was designed to be more accessible to new users. I’ve been reading about tiling window managers like XMonad for a while, but have never found the time to dive in and try one out. Bluetile was the perfect excuse.
However, getting it set up on Ubuntu 9.10 turned out to be a bit of a hassle, so I’ve documented the steps taken here for future use.
First, lets install all dependencies:
We can then pull down and install Cabal, a package manager for Haskell. This is what we’ll use to install Bluetile.
And repeat these steps to install the cabal installer:
Then create a symlink to cabal:
We can now update cabal, and finally install Bluetile:
Run bluetile from a terminal, and we have our first basic tiling window manager! Bluetile will take over from metacity, and give you some quick guidance on how to use the WM. Some important shortcuts are documented on the bluetile site.
The great benefit of tiling window managers is how easy it is to set up workspaces and desktops for a specific task, workflow, or mood. A comment on Hacker News sums it up:
It takes about a week or two to adapt, but it’s a great productivity enhancement. Its really a kind of desktop construction kit: I find myself making layouts that suit my work, mood, and hardware.From this comment by kevbin on news.ycombinator.com.
For example, my original setup for python development in bluetile, which blew away my old one (namely, dragging windows into position, losing focus to browsers, losing my editor etc):
The tiling means I can spend less time worrying about my windows, and more time getting stuff done. Which is reason enough on its own to try Bluetile. Give it a go, even if you’ve never thought about tiling window managers before.
