I was thinking I was going to read about some crazy hack utilizing one of the layouts or something (it's early), but it turns out the author has just discovered the awesome (no pun intended) that is tiling WMs.<p>If you'd like to journey down this road and do not want the large ghci dependency look into dwm (<a href="http://dwm.suckless.org/" rel="nofollow">http://dwm.suckless.org/</a>) (~28KB binary), wmii or awesome.
One note - many gnome based linux distros now use NetworkManager for providing wireless access which does not work once you move to a different window manager like XMonad. So read up on wpa_supplicant and XMonad bindings before you nuke gnome and install xmonad.