[nagisa]

Back when I had my own Xmonad config – during student years with too much time than I knew what to do with – the biggest benefit to Xmonad being a haskell program that I myself wrote was that it was a program that I myself wrote.

This meant that instead of e.g. spawning some utility on a media key input, the compositor could directly stay connected to the dbus and control mpdris clients directly.

The way I see xmonad in retrospective today is that it is/was a "make your own compositor" library much like wlroots, smithay, etc, but it came with enough of the batteries included in the package that spinning up a nice and productive environment took barely any code. Something you can't really do with wlroots or similar.