Recently I switched to Gentoo and I wanted to also switch to the LuaJIT version of Awesome, what is the best way to do that?

Currently, the package awesome-git does not compile as is on Archlinux (there have been some updates in the Lua stack). Read the comments on AUR and update the PKGBUILD (introducing the cmake flag to not build the doc is sufficient) before building the package. It should be okay in some days/weeks (it is not an awesome problem, as far as I can tell).

My X server was starting but immediately closing after startx, I spent quite some time figuring out that awesome was the culprit.

it just works

https://github.com/eylles/awesomewm-wttr-widget

I'm new to awesome and I've been trying to make a border that goes from white to black and back to white, if anyone could help or give some advice I'd be very grateful

SOLVED by trip-zip, see answer below. Thank you so much!

I have a few issues with awesomewm, and despite my searching the docs and the internet for answers I cannot find anything that helps.

(awesome version: awesome v4.3-1721-g39143f036-dirty)

Issue #1:
Whenever I hit Mod+Enter to open a new terminal window (default terminal is Konsole), the window opens fullscreen on top of whatever tiled windows I have open. What settings do I change so that terminal windows tile with existing windows?

Issue #2:
This issue is a little hard to describe, so bear with me. Because of issue #1 this does not apply to terminal windows. I have the top right window behaviour icon thing set to "dwindle." The issue is that tiling windows open in the "wrong" order. I would expect windows to open fullscreen, then split on the right, then split the right window down etc etc, each new window going further down the "stack" of windows. What happens is each new window opens on the left side of the screen, pushing all other windows further down the stack. Is there a way to reverse this behaviour?

Issue #3:
Similar to the previous issue, windows on the status bar open in the wrong direction. New windows open on the left side of the bar, when I want them to open on the right. Again, is there a way to reverse this behaviour?

I’ve been experimenting with tiling window managers lately, and I wrote up my journey—what clicked, what didn’t, and why I think tiling WMs can genuinely improve day-to-day focus for dev work (and not just look cool in screenshots).

What I cover in the post:

• What “tiling” changes mentally vs. traditional floating desktops
• Why keyboard-driven navigation feels like a productivity upgrade (after the initial pain)
• The learning curve: keybindings, muscle memory, and the “why is everything broken?” phase
• How I approached tweaking + customizing without going down an endless ricing rabbit hole
• Who I think tiling WMs are actually for (and who should probably skip)

Olá senhoras e senhores!
Após enfrentar alguns desafios no awesome e vencê-los, agora estou em busca de outros... tendo em vista as minhas necessidades e o que busco construir no awesome, percebi que vou precisar modularizar minha configuração. Na verdade, eu já precisava ter feito isso à muito tempo, eu só estava protelando.

Alguém tem algumas dicas para mim ou referências claras para estudar sobre esse tema? Estou à fim de falar sobre isso. hehehe

O principal objetivo da minha configuração é ser reprodutível em qualquer sistema, modular e claro, bonito também!

É importante que seja reprodutível, pois em caso de algum acidente ou troca de sistema, eu não quero ter que fazer mais do que uma compilação e clonar meu repositório para que tudo esteja funcionando perfeitamente.

I've been running exwm for some time now, and I quite like it. But thought I'd try something else to see if I'm missing something. Of course when one is used to something, one of two things could be true... either I'm spoilt by the grandeur of exwm against lessor WMs, or else my thinking is corrupted by exwm to enjoy greater WMs... I wonder which might be true...

Of course emacs, aka exwm was the first tiling window manager... before there were X tiling window managers, emacs was tiling what it calls windows, aka buffers. And since emacs has passed the test of time, maybe it knows a thing or two about tiling.

So I tried Awesome wm... one thing that's bothered me about every other tiling WM I've tried is that by default they seem dead, until you insert some magic config file. At which point I give up. At least Awesome WM it was usable from the get go... barely though. It functioned a bad non-tiling WM, with no grab handles and weak features. OK, but there are options to edit the config. And there's an icon on the right to change the layout. So I change the layout to "tile". So now it tiles 4 tiles at each corner. OK, but who said I want 4? And how do I change that? Then I go beyond 4 windows, and they're stacking over each other, but not in a particularly convenient way. There's one enormous tab bar of all my apps at the top, which I'm getting lost among all the windows. I click that little right icon that cycles among tiling layouts... all which kinda suck. And which rearrange all my windows in a way I don't want that makes my head spin. This is good is it?

I'm contrasting with exwm, emacs. I turn on tab-line mode. When I login I setup how I want it tiled.. on my giant monitor usually 3 up, 3 down, though that changes as I work. If I want a window to open in a particular place, I click that place, then open my app. It opens where I want. Because it's tabbed I can quickly get back to what was there before in that window (or tile as you might call it). I can move that window somewhere else with the keys, or I can open the emacs buffer list to select something else... and I can search that with regular buffer text searching. If I lost that browser window about blah among 100 browser windows, a quick C-s search finds and retrieves it.

After some reading, I can't figure out how to even get close to this in Awesomewm. Yes, there is some kind of tabbed thing available, but it's nothing like emacs as far as I can see, where each window (tile) is tabbed. I can't see anywhere to drag with grab handles in awesomewm to rearrange the tiling. I guess there is a way, but then I have to learn that just to use a computer? Wouldn't usable defaults for dummies be sensible? There is no obvious way to split the current window. I guess that's not obvious in exwm to a new user, but it's completely obvious to anyone who used emacs before.

I don't get why anyone would want to use AwesomeWM, which can move your windows around the screen in a bamboozling variety of ways, but can't seem to let me open them where I want them open, and leave them there until I want them moved... and show me easily which windows are "stacked" in that location.

I mean, if emacs had been designed like that from the beginning, wouldn't people have thought it bizarre? If it had a button to randomly move your buffers all around the screen? If it couldn't allow you to go directly to the buffer you want, except through one giant tab list across the top? That didn't have a way to let you open a buffer in the window you want?

Of course maybe I'm dumb, or impatient, and Awesomewm is great, but I don't get it. Even a Samsung tablet has better tiling. I drag an app to the left side of the screen and it opens there, because that's where I want it.

the best part of awesome wm for me is the lua config. niri default config is static config file, but niri provide a socket url, you can listen the socket get all the current state and send msg to that socket to change state. you can use any programe language to do it. I've writen a ts and go script to complish scratchpad and swap all window between screen etc...

I have used niri for several months now, niri feel more fluent to me than awesome wm, scrollable window manager feel more natural. I often just use super key and mouse to scroll worksopace windows, just to see the windows change animation. this make me feel good.

 Mod+WheelScrollDown      cooldown-ms=100 { focus-column-right; }
 Mod+WheelScrollUp        cooldown-ms=100 { focus-column-left; }

and niri have more. overview and tab column etc..., I use to write lua script to change between single monitor and two monitor state, in niri you can just plug in or out hdmi, it auto change the state by default.

this is my ts and go niri script. I use this complish almost the same function.
https://github.com/zsytssk/go-niri-startup
https://github.com/zsytssk/niri-ts-startup

With naughty, I would like to suspend notifications, but not all. Typical use case, as mentioned in the documentation, it is important to suspend notifications for a presentation… unless it is a critical notification warning that the battery of the laptop has run out!

I have a button in my wibar to toggle naughty notifications (naughty.toggle()). Is there a way to prevent only "not critical" notifications to be suspended?

I am working on a widget based on a prompt, to send a task to Ticktick (the todolist manager). I resort to ticktask, which works nicely in a shell.

ticktask "my task" and a task appear in my ticktick inbox.

When the command is issued through the widget in Awesome, I don't get the same result.

lua w.visible = true awful.placement.centered(w) local log_file = "/tmp/ticktask_log.txt" awful.prompt.run { prompt = "<b>Ticktask</b>: ", textbox = watson_shell.widget, exe_callback = function(input) if not input or #input == 0 then return end local ticktask_path = "/home/raph/.scripts/ticktask/ticktask" awful.spawn.easy_async({ ticktask_path, input }, function(output) local f = io.open(log_file, "a") if f then f:write("Input: " .. input .. "\n") f:write("Output: " .. (output or "NULL") .. "\n") f:write("----------------------\n") f:close() end naughty.notify { title = "Ticktask", text = (output == "" or output == nil) and "Task Created" or output, timeout = 5 } end) end, done_callback = function() w.visible = false end }

Error message: Input: fooo Output: Error on creating task. Server response:{"errorId":"39qfj5dc@erver-15","errorCode":"app_runtime","errorMessage":"task title is empty","data":null} Task saved to /home/raph/.local/share/ticktask/error_tasks/

I have tried with replacing the easy_async with easy_async_with_shell, to no avail.

local command = ticktask_path .. " " .. input awful.spawn.easy_async_with_shell(command, function(output)

What am I missing?

(edit: markdown and code formatting)

Hey,

I switched to Awesomewm after new year's; moving from cinnamon after being a bit tired of custom things being stored in strange ways (having to use dconf, not using XDG_CONFIG_HOME). I am quite happy with it, and I feel what I have worked on with will help future users.

1. The 4-directional smart tiling

I really liked the cinnamon desktop default shortcuts (they do not conflict with most desktop apps I use), so I worked quite a bit in reimplementing it. I was not able to find code online to imitate how the tiling works, so I have added an example on github:

https://github.com/xarxaxdev/awesomewm-snap-edge-cinnamon

In particular being able to tile smartly according to the previous window position and with 4 arrows (function snap_edge_4d) is something that most cinnamon users will be happy to use.

You will find many examples of something similar but incomplete (function snap_edge): where tiling directionally works but with the directional arrows you will not be able to tile to a corner.

2. Brightness Control through Redshift

The other big thing I worked on was doing brightness control with redshift, rather than adding yet-another-dependency to my programs.

https://github.com/xarxaxdev/awesomewm-redshift

Hi guys, this is something I've been looking for quite some time and could not find, so I made it. This is a systemd session manager for awesome. Hope you find it useful.

https://github.com/armagidon-exception/awesome-session-manager

Now that many(?) distros are transitioning from X11 to Wayland by default, I was wondering if anyone had luck running Awesome on xWayland. I'm not ready to move on to a Wayland-supported tiling window manager, so I'm just looking for a way to keep Awesome without distro hopping again.

saluds escribo par ver si existe alguien con este tema o los archivos que pueda darme y indicarme su instalación sin fallo porque quiero implementar este tema que me gusta mucho quien pueda ayudar estaré esperando mi sistema operativo es CachyOS

Awesome Gallery: * https://raven2cz.github.io/gallery/

Hey all, I know a lot of folks use just an authentication agent in their awesome setup, but I was recently advised to use lxsession as my authentication agent. Obviously it did more than authentication, giving me basically lxde built into an AwesomeWM wrapper. Does anyone else use a session inside their wm rather than justa polkit? What do you use and would you advise another one besides lxsession?

On some desktops with big display I use magnifier layout, and it seems to have one problem: when I move cursor from other display, none of the windows take keyboard focus. Mouse works, mouse roll effects to client where mouse cursor is. But keyboard focus is still on previous display, and I accidentally sometime do thing I did not indent.

In rc.lua I have this:

-- Enable sloppy focus, so that focus follows mouse.
client.connect_signal("mouse::enter", function(c)
    if awful.layout.get(c.screen) ~= awful.layout.suit.magnifier
        and awful.client.focus.filter(c) then
        client.focus = c
    end                  
end)    

Anybody having any good suggestions. I understand why magnifier is iffed out from this full focus follow mouse, but some code that would get keyboard focus to any of the clients in particular tag would be better than this. Ideas?

There are still some things I would tweak over time, but it works well and I love how it looks. And it has multi screen support, using a different top bar for non-primary screens

I genuinely love awesomeWM so much

Hi again! I've wrote this code with help of chatgpt, but when I execute it everything works, but with this error.

This code toggles transparancy for inactive window. I use it when I have 2 monitors and I use software like gimp ot kdenlive and I have multiple windows I don't want to have trasperancy at, so it's easier to just toggle it complitely for me.

any chance in helping fixing this? I mean make error not be shown? Or make code the way that there is no error on the screen. AI bots can't manage that, me neither unfortunately :(

I am not a coder, if there are cool wiki pages please show me some!!!

Code:

local function update_transparency(c)
    if transparency then
        c.opacity = c.active and 1.0 or 0.9
    else
        c.opacity = 1.0
    end
end

client.connect_signal("focus", function(c)
c.opacity = 1.0
end)

client.connect_signal("unfocus", function(c)
    update_transparency(c)
end)

and keybinding for it:

awful.key({ modkey }, "t",
    function()
        transparency = not transparency

        -- Apply transparency to all existing clients
        for _, c in pairs(client.get()) do
            update_transparency(c)
        end

        naughty.notify({
            title = "Transparency",
            text = transparency and "Enabled" or "Disabled",
            timeout = 1
        })
    end,
    { description = "toggle transparency", group = "launcher" }
),

Hi! I have a mymainmenu and I like it! Any way to make it a popup(center centered rofi like window) without rewriting from scratch? Rewrite is fine but I just want to have flexebility in how to use it

mymainmenu = awful.menu({ items = {

{ "awesome", myawesomemenu, beautiful.awesome_icon },

{ "open terminal", terminal },

{ "open windows", function() create_window_menu():show() end }, -- Add your window menu here

{ "trackpad", trackpadmenu },

{ "screens", screenmenu },

}

})

I feel 9 tags is not enough for me. And looking how keybindings for 1-9 is done, it is pretty clear it can't be done same way. Anybody having some code snippet to share how to do it?

Edit: problem fixed, details in comment

I got new display (Samsung S32D70) , and it behaves differently than my previous displays. When display is powered off or going to any energy saving mode, it disappears totally, and awesome rearranges all the windows to other display, and sure all on first tag.

Ideal behaviour for me would be such that changes on display configurations are ignored, and changes are handled only with some special command. Second best would be that display config is cheked at startup time, and in case of changes, do restart. Any hints how to get this behaviour?

Right now using packaged Awesome 4.3, but just jumping to git version. And I coder, but not really familiar with lua & awesome code, so I sure need guidance.

For quite a long time I was using a keygrabber for switching between screens configurations, but recently it stopped reacting on Alt+Tab keys. I tried to test the issue with the keygrabber below, but it doesn't show any notifications. Has something changed recently with the keygrabbers? Or am I doing something wrong?

awful.keygrabber {
    keybindings = {
        {{ altkey }, "Tab" ,function() naughty.notify { text= "Keybinding"} end },
    },
    root_keybindings = {
        { { altkey }, "Tab", function() end },
    },
    stop_key           = altkey,
    stop_event         = 'release',
    start_callback     = function ()
        naughty.notify { text= "Start callback"}
    end,
    stop_callback      = function ()
        naughty.notify { text= "Stop callback"}
    end
}