I am writing this while waiting for my daughter’s ballet class to end. The dance studio graciously provides wireless internet access. I have an ssh session to a remote machine behind a firewall which exposes only port 22. From there I ssh to another machine, a virtual one, on which I am installing xmonad 0.5. Amazing.

That said, I want to offer my congratulations to the xmonad team on their latest release. I have been using version 0.4 and have been extremely pleased with it. Xmonad is the window manager I have wanted for a long time.

The v.5 promises to be easier to configure than earlier versions, but I have found v.4 pretty sweet with very little customization at all. How sweet? Well, I am writing this on my Powerbook, a very nice mobile device. But come time to hack, I’d take my Ubuntu box running xmonad over a Mac or a Windows machine, and I own all three.

Speaking of Ubuntu, I noticed the the Hardy Heron apt repositories have an xmonad package. So pretty soon it will be drop dead simple to try xmonad. In the meantime, installing from source is not terribly hard.