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Over the past fortnight I’ve re-installed Arch on a few boxes, mainly because my new workstation arrived and it prompted a clean out. In an urge to get going ASAP I installed the gnome & gnome-extra packages and was really impressed with the new Gnome Shell.
As I have mentioned before, xmonad on vanilla X has been my Window Manager of choice for some 4 years now. I’m not going to go into the details of why, but you can see this post if you’re interested.
However, being the keyboard & hotkey freak I am I’ve found it a little frustrating using the Shell, not to mention the damn GUI that is the only way to configure hotkeys, give me a text files any day. So, how am I going to resolve these frustrations?
Before anyone tells me what I already know, yep you can use Xmonad with Gnome. You can’t, however, use Xmonad with Gnome Shell, as Gnome Shell is the Window Manager.
It’s possible to use Gnome’s “Failback mode” but then you’ve lost the new features of shell all together.
One of the most interesting aspects, for me, is how Gnome Shell is using a JavaScript engine for the Window Management logic and CSS for the Styling. I’ve already had a play with some of the themes, and it’s terribly easy.
IMHO the use of JavaScript & CSS by the gnome development team is a very savvy move, as they are some of the most widely used languages (if you can call CSS a language!) in the world today. There are some truly gifted JavaScript developers and you only have to look at the web today to see the wonderfully aesthetic designs & feels that are available through CSS.
So, I’m going to put my 13+ years experience of JavaScript & CSS to try and bring some of the time-saving, keyboard & hotkey-freekary to gnome.
Did you manage to get any xmonad-like keyboard & hotkey-freekary to work? I’d love to try a gnome3 that’s so nice to work with a s xmonad.
Any updates on this? I’d be interested in knowing how it turned out for you.
@Oscar & @Matthew
Nope, I very quickly got annoyed with Gnome 3 and returned to a vanilla XMonad without any gnome stuff, and have since moved to use OSX (on a hackintosh) as my primary workstation. I’ve tried a couple of time since to use gnome 3 on my laptop etc, but within a very short number of hours reverted to other DWM – there’s a number of things that I don’t like about it, sorry I couldn’t be any more helpful.