XMonad's IM Layout

One of my favorite modules from xmonad-contrib is the IM layout. It’s a tiling algorithm designed to handle your roster and chat windows in the best way possible. Here I’m going to outline how I set this up in my xmonad.hs.

What it looks like 🔗

Personally, I want my roster tiled in its own properly-sized location on one side, and all other IM related windows floating. I also want any of those IM windows to automatically be pushed to the IM workspace.

Here we can see that my roster is fit in its own little tile on the left, sized properly. The rest of the screen is tiled as a grid of whatever other applications I open. My chat window is always floating.

So, how would you set this up?

Imports and Main 🔗

This post assumes you’ve imported the required modules and you have a main function setup as shown:

-- imports
import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks
import XMonad.Hooks.ManageHelpers
import XMonad.Layout.IM
import XMonad.Layout.PerWorkspace

import qualified XMonad.StackSet as W

-- main
main = xmonad $ defaultConfig
    { ...
    -- all of our changes will take place in the myLayout and
    -- myManageHook definitions.
    , layoutHook = myLayout
    , manageHook = myManageHook
    }

The Layout Hook 🔗

Here’s a simple layoutHook that adds the IM extension on a specific workspace and has the added bonus that you can cycle between all of your “standard” layouts in the space that’s not taken up by the roster.

Also, if your IM client isn’t open, the workspace will behave like any other.

-- Layouts
myLayout = avoidStruts $ onWorkspace "3-im" imLayout $ standardLayouts

  where
    --          numMasters, resizeIncr, splitRatio
    tall = Tall 1           0.02        0.5

    -- define the list of standardLayouts
    standardLayouts = tall ||| Mirror tall ||| Full

    -- notice that withIM, which normally acts on one layout, can also 
    -- work on a list of layouts (yay recursive data types!)
    imLayout = withIM (1/10) (Role "roster") standardLayouts

I’ve defined the function standardLayouts, which we’ll use on all workspaces. Then for “3-im”, I define imLayout which uses the withIM modifier.

Now you should have a nice IM layout setup, go ahead and M-q, then head to workspace 3 (or whatever) and fire up your IM client

Feel free to stop here if you plan on having your IM Chat windows tiled. I think that’s kind of ugly, so I choose to have any IM-related window besides the roster floated by default. My manageHook takes care of that.

The Manage Hook 🔗

-- Manage hook
myManageHook = composeAll
    [ -- whatever you might already have, plus...

    -- move all IM windows to IM workspace
    , className =? "Gajim.py" --> doShift "3-chat"

    -- and float everything but the roster
    , classNotRole ("Gajim.py", "roster") --> doFloat
    ]

    where
        classNotRole :: (String, String) -> Query Bool
        classNotRole (c,r) = className =? c <&&> role /=? r

        role = stringProperty "WM_WINDOW_ROLE"

This will move all IM windows to the IM workspace, and float anything that’s of the IM Class but not the roster’s Role.