I'm looking into Xmonad. One problem I'm having is that most of my applications in Xmonad don't have anti-aliasing.

For example gnome-terminal & evolution. I have this in my .Xresources:

Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.autohint: true
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.hintstyle: slight
Xft.rgba: rgb

And this in my .gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-theme-name="Ambiance"
gtk-icon-theme-name="ubuntu-mono-dark"
gtk-font-name="Sans 10"
gtk-cursor-theme-name="DMZ-White"
gtk-cursor-theme-size=0
gtk-toolbar-style=GTK_TOOLBAR_BOTH
gtk-toolbar-icon-size=GTK_ICON_SIZE_LARGE_TOOLBAR
gtk-button-images=1
gtk-menu-images=1
gtk-enable-event-sounds=1
gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds=1
gtk-xft-antialias=1
gtk-xft-hinting=1
gtk-xft-hintstyle="hintfull"
gtk-xft-rgba="rgb"
include "/home/leon/.gtkrc-2.0.mine"

But I still have no anti-aliasing. When I launch gnome-settings-daemon I do get anti-aliasing. But I don't want to run gnome-settings-daemon.

What could be the problem? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop.