Xmonad/Installing xmonad

XMonad

Read me first

After installing, you'll have an xmonad binary on your system. From there, you'll need to wire xmonad up to your login manager.

Linux

Arch

 $ pacman -S xmonad-contrib # for the xmonad core and contrib packages

or else:

 $ pacman -S xmonad         # for just the xmonad core package

See xmonad on ArchWiki for more info.

Debian

To install:

 $ apt-get install xmonad                     # for just the xmonad binary, without the ability to configure

In addition to that, if you want to write a configuration file, you should get one of these:

 $ apt-get install libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev # for all of xmonad core and xmonad-contrib (depends on the following pkg)
 $ apt-get install libghc6-xmonad-dev         # for just xmonad core

There are also -doc and -prof suffixes for various packages. I'm not sure what they contain.

Note: The are backports available for debian etch at http://newpeople.debian.org/~jps/etch/.

Fedora

To install:

 $ yum install xmonad

Additionally install ghc-xmonad-devel and ghc-xmonad-contrib-devel

 $ yum install ghc-xmonad-contrib-devel

xmonad is also available in EPEL for rhel6.

Gentoo

 $ emerge xmonad-contrib 
 # the contrib package depends on xmonad so it gets also installed

 if you only want to install xmonad without contrib you could use:
 $ emerge xmonad

 An actively maintained haskell overlay contains many
 newer or more obscure versions of projects, including ebuilds for
 darcs xmonad/contrib, cabal-install, haskellmode for vim, and many
 other goodies.

NixOS

To use xmonad as your window manager, modify /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to specify (as of 2016 Nov, NixOS 16.x or 17.x):

  services.xserver = {
    windowManager.xmonad = {
      enable = true;
      enableContribAndExtras = true;
      extraPackages = haskellPackages: [
        haskellPackages.xmonad-contrib
        haskellPackages.xmonad-extras
        haskellPackages.xmonad
      ];
    };
    windowManager.default = "xmonad";

It may also be convenient to perform various startup operations like adjusting the keymappings:

    displayManager.sessionCommands = with pkgs; lib.mkAfter
      ''
      xmodmap /path/to/.Xmodmap
      '';
  };

It's also helpful to specify the above package list in the `environment.systemPackages` portion of the configuration.nix file.

The above will enable you to login with the generic xmonad configuration; most xmonad users will customize their configuration via $HOME/.xmonad/xmonad.hs. In order for this local version to be built (or rebuilt, on Alt-Q for example) the xmonad libraries and dependencies must be present in the logged-in users environment:

  $ nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -iA haskellPackages.xmonad \
                            -A haskellPackages.xmonad-extras \
                            -A haskellPackages.xmonad-contrib

Remember to also install any applications that you specified in the displayManager.sessionCommands:

  $ nix-env -i xmodmap

Ubuntu

See #Debian.

Note: On Hardy Heron and earlier, the libghc6-x11-dev package was compiled without Xinerama support. This means that if you want multi-monitor support, you have three options:

• upgrade to >= Intrepid Ibex
• install xmonad (and the Haskell X11 library on which it depends) through one of the #Generic options
• follow the instructions in this blog post to recompile the libghc6-x11-dev yourself (unverified)

BSD

FreeBSD

For only the window manager:

 # cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/hs-xmonad
 # sudo make install distclean

And the contrib package:

 # cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/hs-xmonad-contrib
 # sudo make install distclean

OpenBSD

xmonad is in the ports tree. To install it,

 sudo pkg_add xmonad

Mac OS X

Install ghc using MacPorts:

 $ port install ghc

And then follow one of the #Generic instructions.

Alternatively install a ghc wrapper and xmonad with Nix.

 $ nix-env -i <package>

See more at Xmonad/Using xmonad on Apple OSX.

Generic

From Hackage

xmonad can be installed from source on any system with an up-to-date Haskell toolchain:

 $ cabal install xmonad