A Gnome Socket Applet



Published on February 26, 2011 under the tag Making Gnome play nicely with xmonad and friendsPublished on February 26, 2011 under the tag haskell

I’m an enthusiastic user of the xmonad window manager. It allows me to be more productive while coding, and to focus on what I’m doing.

When I got my new laptop (about 3 months ago), I decided to give Gnome another try. Together with xmonad, it makes a nice combination, since you get the excellent integration of the different gnome components, and the simplicity of xmonad.

When you use the default gnome panel, you get a list of windows, so you can see which windows are open. However, for xmonad, this is kind of redundant: since it is a tiling window manager, you can just see what windows are open. Instead, you want other information in your panel: the currently used xmonad layout, the title of the focused window…

So, I wrote a small applet called gnome-socket-applet which allows simple communication from xmonad to the gnome panel. You simply add the applet to your panel, and it will act as a small server, listening on a port you specified.

Then, xmonad simply sets the applet text by creating a connection to the applet server and writing the desired text. In my case, the applet looks like this:

Screenshot of the applet

The applet is written in C and should work together with most window managers that support adding custom hooks. Install instructions and example code for xmonad are also given on the gnome-socket-applet page.