Change Log / Release Notes

0.18.1 (March 7, 2026)

Breaking Changes

• Use cabal for --recompile if there is a .cabal file in the config directory and none of build, stack.yaml, flake.nix, nor default.nix exist.

Enhancements

Bug Fixes

Other

PR #404 (see last change in 0.17.1) has been reverted, because the affected compilers are (hopefully) no longer being used.

All 9.0 releases of GHC, plus 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 have the join point bug. Note that 9.0.x is known to also have GC issues and is officially deprecated, and the only 9.2 release that should be used is 9.2.8. Additionally, GHC HQ doesn't support releases before 9.6.6.

0.18.0 (February 3, 2024)

Breaking Changes

• Dropped support for GHC 8.4.

Enhancements

• Exported sendRestart and sendReplace from XMonad.Operations.

• Exported buildLaunch from XMonad.Main.

• Tall does not draw windows with zero area.

• XMonad.Operations.floatLocation now applies size hints. This means windows will snap to these hints as soon as they're floated (mouse move, keybinding). Previously that only happened on mouse resize.

• Recompilation now detects flake.nix and default.nix (can be a symlink) and switches to using nix build as appropriate.

• Added unGrab to XMonad.Operations; this releases XMonad's passive keyboard grab, so other applications (like scrot) can do their thing.

Bug Fixes

• Duplicated floats (e.g. from X.A.CopyToAll) no longer escape to inactive screens.

0.17.2 (April 2, 2023)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the build with GHC 9.6.

0.17.1 (September 3, 2022)

Enhancements

• Added custom cursor shapes for resizing and moving windows.

• Exported cacheNumlockMask and mkGrabs from XMonad.Operations.

• Added willFloat function to XMonad.ManageHooks to detect whether the (about to be) managed window will be a floating window or not.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed border color of windows with alpha channel. Now all windows have the same opaque border color.

• Change the main loop to try to avoid GHC bug 21708 on systems running GHC 9.2 up to version 9.2.3. The issue has been fixed in GHC 9.2.4 and all later releases.

0.17.0 (October 27, 2021)

Enhancements

• Migrated X.L.LayoutCombinators.(|||) into XMonad.Layout, providing the ability to directly jump to a layout with the JumpToLayout message.

• Recompilation now detects stack.yaml (can be a symlink) alongside xmonad.hs and switches to using stack ghc. We also updated INSTALL.md with instructions for cabal-install that lead to correct recompilation.

  Deprecation warnings during recompilation are no longer suppressed to make it easier for us to clean up the codebase. These can still be suppressed manually using an OPTIONS_GHC pragma with -Wno-deprecations.

• Improve handling of XDG directories.

  1. If all three of xmonad's environment variables (XMONAD_DATA_DIR, XMONAD_CONFIG_DIR, and XMONAD_CACHE_DIR) are set, use them.
  2. If there is a build script called build (see these build scripts for usage examples) or configuration xmonad.hs in ~/.xmonad, set all three directories to ~/.xmonad.
  3. Otherwise, use the xmonad directory in XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, and XDG_CACHE_HOME (or their respective fallbacks). These directories are created if necessary.

  In the cases of 1. and 3., the build script or executable is expected to be in the config dir.

  Additionally, the xmonad config binary and intermediate object files were moved to the cache directory (only relevant if using XDG or XMONAD_CACHE_DIR).

• Added Foldable, Functor, and Traversable instances for Stack.

• Added Typeable layout constraint to LayoutClass, making it possible to cast Layout back into a concrete type and extract current layout state from it.

• Export constructor for Choose and CLR from Module.Layout to allow pattern-matching on the left and right sub-layouts of Choose l r a.

• Added withUnfocused function to XMonad.Operations, allowing for X operations to be applied to unfocused windows.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug when using multiple screens with different dimensions, causing some floating windows to be smaller/larger than the size they requested.

• Compatibility with GHC 9.0

• Fixed dunst notifications being obscured when moving floats. https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/208

Breaking Changes

• Made (<&&>) and (<||>) non-strict in their right operand; i.e., these operators now implement short-circuit evaluation so the right operand is evaluated only if the left operand does not suffice to determine the result.

• Change ScreenDetail to a newtype and make RationalRect strict in its contents.

• Added the extensibleConf field to XConfig which makes it easier for contrib modules to have composable configuration (custom hooks, …).

• util/GenerateManpage.hs is no longer distributed in the tarball. Instead, the manpage source is regenerated and manpage rebuilt automatically in CI.

• DestroyWindowEvent is now broadcasted to layouts to let them know window-specific resources can be discarded.

0.15 (September 30, 2018)

• Reimplement sendMessage to deal properly with windowset changes made during handling.

• Add new library functions windowBracket and modifyWindowSet to XMonad.Operations.

0.14.2 (August 21, 2018)

Bug Fixes

• Add the sample configuration file xmonad.hs again to the release tarball. [https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/181]

0.14.1 (August 20, 2018)

Breaking Changes

• The cabal build no longer installs xmonad.hs, xmonad.1, and xmonad.1.html as data files. The location cabal picks for chose files isn't useful as standard tools like man(1) won't find them there. Instead, we rely on distributors to pick up the files from the source tarball during the build and to install them into proper locations where their users expect them. [https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/pull/127]

Bug Fixes

• Add support for GHC 8.6.x by providing an instance for 'MonadFail X'. A side effect of that change is that our code no longer compiles with GHC versions prior to 8.0.x. We could work around that, no doubt, but the resulting code would require CPP and Cabal flags and whatnot. It feels more reasonable to just require a moderately recent compiler instead of going through all that trouble.

• xmonad no longer always recompile on startup. Now it only does so if the executable does not have the name that would be used for the compilation output. The purpose of recompiling and executing the results in this case is so that the xmonad executable in the package can be used with custom configurations.

Enhancements

• Whenever xmonad recompiles, it now explains how it is attempting to recompile, by outputting logs to stderr. If you are using xmonad as a custom X session, then this will end up in a .xsession-errors file.

0.14 (July 30, 2018)

Bug Fixes

• The state file that xmonad uses while restarting itself is now removed after it is processed. This fixes a bug that manifested in several different ways:

  • Names of old workspaces would be resurrected after a restart
  • Screen sizes would be wrong after changing monitor configuration (#90)
  • spawnOnce stopped working (xmonad/xmonad-contrib#155)
  • Focus did not follow when moving between workspaces (#87)
  • etc.

• Recover old behavior (in 0.12) when focusFollowsMouse == True: the focus follows when the mouse enters another workspace but not moving into any window.

• Compiles with GHC 8.4.1

• Restored compatibility with GHC version prior to 8.0.1 by removing the dependency on directory version 1.2.3.

0.13 (February 10, 2017)

Breaking Changes

• When restarting xmonad, resume state is no longer passed to the next process via the command line. Instead, a temporary state file is created and xmonad's state is serialized to that file.

  When upgrading to 0.13 from a previous version, the --resume command line option will automatically migrate to a state file.

  This fixes issue #12.

Enhancements

• You can now control which directory xmonad uses for finding your configuration file and which one is used for storing the compiled version of your configuration. In order of preference:

  1. New environment variables. If you want to use these ensure you set the correct environment variable and also create the directory it references:

     • XMONAD_CONFIG_DIR
     • XMONAD_CACHE_DIR
     • XMONAD_DATA_DIR

  2. The ~/.xmonad directory.

  3. XDG Base Directory Specification directories, if they exist:

     • XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xmonad
     • XDG_CACHE_HOME/xmonad
     • XDG_DATA_HOME/xmonad

  If none of these directories exist then one will be created using the following logic: If the relevant environment variable mentioned in step (1) above is set, the referent directory will be created and used. Otherwise ~/.xmonad will be created and used.

  This fixes a few issues, notably #7 and #56.

• A custom build script can be used when xmonad is given the --recompile command line option. If an executable named build exists in the xmonad configuration directory it will be called instead of ghc. It takes one argument, the name of the executable binary it must produce.

  This fixes #8. (One of two possible custom build solutions. See the next entry for another solution.)

• For users who build their xmonad configuration using tools such as cabal or stack, there is another option for executing xmonad.

  Instead of running the xmonad executable directly, arrange to have your login manager run your configuration binary instead. Then, in your binary, use the new launch command instead of xmonad.

  This will keep xmonad from using its configuration file checking/compiling code and directly start the window manager without execing any other binary.

  See the documentation for the launch function in XMonad.Main for more details.

  Fixes #8. (Second way to have a custom build environment for XMonad. See previous entry for another solution.)

0.12 (December 14, 2015)

• Compiles with GHC 7.10.2, 7.8.4, and 7.6.3

• Use of data-default allows using def where previously you had to write defaultConfig, defaultXPConfig, etc.

• The setlocale package is now used instead of a binding shipped with xmonad proper allowing the use of Main.hs instead of Main.hsc

• No longer encodes paths for spawnPID

• The default manageHook no longer floats Gimp windows

• Doesn't crash when there are fewer workspaces than screens

• Query is now an instance of Applicative

• Various improvements to the example configuration file