Setting up Xmonad and fun with xinitrc/xsession

Finally, after years of procastinating, I finally installed Xmonad on a new virtual machine that I have been setting up for another project. Since I have been doing almost everything new in the sphere of technology, might as well start a new experience with desktop environment.

Setting up Xmonad was a breeze with apt-get but the next step of setting up GDM to use xmonad for my session turned out to be more fun then I had imagined. When you start your Ubuntu you are presented with the login screen by GNOME. At this time, you can select various session/profile that you would like to use with the login. This information comes from files at /usr/share/xession. One sample:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=XMonad
Comment=Lightweight tiling window manager
Exec=xmonad
Icon=xmonad.png
Type=XSession

The above one is installed with xmonad and selecting the session while logging gives you the simplest xmonad installation. Though this works, I wanted to configure something extra to my needs e.g. gnome-session as it some of the window drawing look nicer (specifically Firefox, Chrome). So thinking that just like back in the days, I have to setup .xinitrc file and it will work, I went ahead and created one with the details I needed. Logout and login and nothing happens. Figuring, I did something wrong I spent sometime making sure the config was correct to the best of my knowledge. Eventually, after much hassles and Googling, figured out Ubuntu uses $HOME/.xsession file. With the knowledge, just doing:

cp .xinitrc .xsession

and selecting User Defined Session in the login window and everybody is happy. In my last 30hours or about of using http://www.xmonad.org, I am already loving it. No more time spent on resizing and moving around windows on my big monitor. Terminal is just mod+space+return away and xterm with Droid Sans Mono is simmply gorgeous.