Today I would like to share the XMonad layout I have written sometime ago. It has been very stable for a while and I think it is now a good time to share it.

It is a layout that organizes windows in columns while offering great flexibility when it comes to arrange the windows. I use it along a tabbed layout and with those two layouts, I do not need anything else really.

Let’s first start with a quick demo of the layout in action:

As one can see in the video, the layout organizes the windows in columns. You can have as many columns as you like. The windows can be freely moved from one column to another, left and right, and, in a single column, up and down. They can also be resized both horizontally and vertically. Adding new column is done by moving a window to the spot you want the column to appear. Simple, easy.

I also use this trick to dock windows together in tabs as showcased in the video.

I can change the focus of the windows using WindowNavigation. Every other command is handled by sending custom messages to the layout. See the source code for details.

With this layout, I can arrange the windows really in any way I want while keeping them always tiled.

I could not find anything like this in the xmonad-contrib repository. The closest I found was ResizableTall that I used for a while before developping my own. However, it is limited to two columns. Another interesting one is rowOfColumns. It is pretty similar to mine, but it wasn’t working very well with the tabbed sub-layout if I remember correctly.

That’s it. The layout has now been upstreamed and the source code is fully available in the xmonad-contrib repository.