When I make changes to xmonad.hs, I almost always make syntax errors at first try (I guess haskell syntax is too cryptic for me, but Xmonad is too good a tool to give up). When I xmonad --recompile in a terminal, these errors are listed in my terminal, which is useful. But they also are listed in a crappy, annoying xmessage window which pops up, how can I avoid this?
Edit: I haven't seen the problem for some time now on my distribution, I guess developers caught the redundancy.
Sadly this is hardcoded into the XMonad recompile function at this time.
This should be able to be worked around by appending a noop implementation of xmessage to your PATH when you run xmonad! In most cases something like the following should work:
tmp=$(mktemp -d)
touch $tmp/xmessage
chmod +x $tmp/xmessage
Now run
PATH="$PATH:$tmp" xmonad --recompile
To recompile with no xmessage dialogue!
For Nix users like me, the steps might be different. In my case the file $(which xmonad) explicitly defines a XMONAD_MESSAGE env var pointing to the xmessage build in the Nix store, and so my fix looked something like this:
tmp=$(mktemp -d)
touch $tmp/xmessage
chmod +x $tmp/xmessage
cp $(which xmonad) > ./xmonad
# edit ./xmonad to change XMONAD_MESSAGE to set it to $tmp/xmonad
chmod +x ./xmonad
# now we can run:
./xmonad --recompile
