WMII to XMonad

Update (2008/12/08): With the pipe-notification Pidgin plugin, the example script provided with it and a little modification to your status script, it's possible to have notification on new messages. See conky-bar for an example - the first command simply calls the pipe-notification example script.

Update 2 (2009/01/16): It can actually be even simpler than that. One of the plugins included with Pidgin, Message Notification, has an option for setting the urgent flag on windows with new messages. You can make XMonad highlight the names of workspaces with urgent windows (see my xmonad.hs). Tada - message notification.

Update 3 (2009/03/04): Actually, the above links were dead. You can now find all my dotfiles in a GitHub repo.

I gave up trying to bend WMII to work the way I wanted it, and gave XMonad a try. After the initial difficulties with Haskell, it feels like a grown-up WMII (XMonad is written in Haskell, a functional language). It first seemed strange to have.. well, anything useful written in a functional language (no offense, I just haven't encountered any such)... But it does work, and quite well at that.

If interested, you can check out the current state of my xmonad.hs at dotfiles.org GitHub. Once it's about done, I'll probably send it/upload it/whatever to the XMonad community configs. It started out as a modification on And1's config, but most of it has been replaced/rewritten.

Some details, in case you're interested: I use dzen2 bars for status information and the like, which means the limitations of the (only one) WMII status-bar are gone. I kept all nine workspaces, and use ones tagged www (with M-w), mail (M-e) and im (M-i) with rules for moving the appropriate windows there when opened. There are some key-bindings in there for controlling mpd through mpc (next song, previous song, toggle pause/play and a big dzen bar for the current song, shown for just a second).

<Subjective, no flames please>
XMonad feels a bit alien at first, but it's really a bit like the switch from Ubuntu to Arch Linux: you can do everything with either one, but one (Arch, and XMonad) is just made to be customized.
</Subjective, no flames please>

It also isn't the 'build everything yourself' kind of customization: there are numerous, complete configurations published you can use as a starting point. The documentation of the config system is very well written, and easy to use even without prior knowledge of Haskell (I speak from experience).

All in all, I like it.

MSN on Linux

Update (2008/11/20): Added the Pidgin music-tracker plugin to the comparison table.

I use Linux. Probably no surprise there. I also use IMs. However, I'm Hungarian, and currently in a community of more-or-less complete tech illiterate people. No offense meant: without them, there wouldn't be even a slight chance of getting a job in IT. Anyway, these friends of mine use *shudder* MSN - or Windows Live Messenger, as it likes being called lately. So, I needed an MSN client on Linux.

My criteria (in order of descending importance):

• It must work
• It must allow grouping contacts in the contact list
• It must support tabbed chat windows
• It should be reasonably fast
• It should handle MSN Live! colored nicks (preferably color the nicks, optionally just remove the tags)
• Showing music I'm listening to is nice.

The two main competitors are aMSN and Pidgin. Other clients of note are MSN Web Messenger, meebo (both web-based) and some clients using the same backend as Pidgin - see here.

aMSN

The aMSN project aims to build an MSN clone for Linux, and is making quite good progress. I've used it for quite a while, even hacked up an (80% functional) script to fetch current song info from Banshee 1. All in all it's a mature project. My main problems are temporary hangups and that it's generally slow. Also, written in TCL/TK, it doesn't integrate nicely with the desktop.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a modular, multi-protocol IM client. As such, it's main focus isn't MSN, but support for it is quite complete, especially from 2.5 on. There's a forked MSN protocol backend at Google Code called msn-pecan. I haven't tried it myself. My main issue here is that I can't find a way to set my personal message. A little plus is that it integrates nicely with Gnome (I don't know about KDE, I guess it must be OK if the deps are met).

Update 23/02/2009: To set the personal message, just select a status (like available). A text entry widget appears below the status selection combobox. That's where the personal message goes.

Side-by-side

aMSN	Criteria	Pidgin
Check	Works	Check
Check	Group contacts	Check
Check	Tabbed chats	Check
Sluggish	Fast	Check
With Colored Nicks plugin Background color not supported	MSN Live! colored nicks	With Pidgin Plus! plugin Fails in some cases Gradients not supported
With Music plugin	Show current song	Several plugins, music-tracker works fine for me.

All in all, I find the responsiveness of Pidgin more important than the feature-completeness of aMSN - and Pidgin's quickly gaining ground in this aspect as well. Also, Pidgin's written in C, which I'm way more familiar with than TCL/TK.
YMMV.