Xmonad/Using xmonad in MATE
From HaskellWiki
1 Using xmonad in MATE
MATE is a supported fork of Gnome 2, with various components renamed to avoid collisions with Gnome components. At present, Fedora ships both MATE and an xmonad session using it (`xmonad-mate` package); for other platforms, look for MATE in your package manager or check http://mate-desktop.org.
The current development version of xmonad-contrib from darcs has an `XMonad.Config.Mate` which should work out of the box on most platforms. For earlier versions, you may want to copy `XMonad.Config.Gnome` to `~/.xmonad/lib/XMonad/Config/Mate.hs` and replace (matching case as appropriate) all instances of "`gnome`" with "`mate`". This will affect the terminal, the session manager connection, and the X11 message sent to activate the run command dialog, among other things.
2 Replacing the default window manager
You will need to create a freedesktop.org desktop file for xmonad, probably in `/usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop`:
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=XMonad Exec=/usr/bin/xmonad NoDisplay=true X-GNOME-WMName=XMonad X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true
To replace `marco` with `xmonad` for all sessions, use the following (per user):
dconf write /org/mate/session/required-components/windowmanager xmonad
(TODO: alternative session file)