Awesome Window Manager

The window managers of normal people have finally driven me crazy. The two simple things I require seem to not be possible with less effort than writing my own window manager from scratch.

Normal window managers ostensibly support "themes" but in practice, it’s a complete mess. There are so many overlapping semi-compatible systems and the documentation is always very scant amounting to little more than: go to this sketchy web site, download a theme, use the automagical install (which doesn’t even work). I don’t want a theme — I want to make my focused title bars a bright color (if I must waste screen real estate with title bars). I have never found any sensible official documentation for that level of customization. I’m mystified by how people are creating these themes since there seems to be no documentation for how to do this comprehensively (i.e. not just editing someone else’s).

I hate the name; it should be called "Tolerable WM". (Perhaps it’s balanced by one of its internal modules called "awful".) However, "Awesome", the window manager, seems to be customizable and focused on doing things in an optimal way. As with many of my other favorite programs, one thing that is completely unoptimized is how easy is it for pre-school children to use immediately with no training — this is the objective that normal systems have optimized at the expense of every other property. I’m a professional computer user so I’m willing to make a proper investment to get the optimal system for my needs.

The main modifier strategy for interacting with awesome is the key which I have almost never pressed since it first defaced keyboards in the 1990s. But today, I can concede the absurd ubiquity of this idiot keyboard addition and what better use could it possibly have than to drive your window management system? So I’m fine with using keycode 133 (keysym 0xffeb, Super_L). This is usually referred to in documentation as "Mod4". Normal people know it as "the windows key".

You can use the awesome-client to interact with your session.

This seems to want to be a huge mess — exactly like all other window manager swamps. However, there is an end to the configuration rabbit hole with awesome.

I believe the master default configuration lives here.

To override it you need to have your own here.

I don’t get the feeling that these cascade in any elaborate way. It just uses the first one it can find starting with the users'.

Many important things live in places like this.

Many people like to have familiar applications start cluttering the screen right away when the system starts. I do not. However, there are some things that must be run immediately to avoid screen "saving" annoyances.

I derived my strategic approach from the ArchWiki. Start by making one of these.

Make it executable and fill it with this.

The run1x function is to sensibly check if the thing you want to run is already running (and ignore it if so). I don’t do this check for the xset commands because if I turn that damn screen blanking off a million times it won’t be enough.

Then add this line in ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua right after all the "local" definitions are set.

With that in place, the window manager will come up ready to go.

Along with wibox shown above, this seems to be where the libraries are kept.

One of my primary motivations for using this window manager was to emphatically assert my dominance over windows that could not properly make it clear that they were focused. Although I’ve typed passwords into millions of correctly focused windows, the couple of mistakes that slipped past me were too much to bear. I found that configuring awesome to do what I needed was pretty easy.

In the theme.lua file just change these.

Some people like omnipresent clutter on their screens. I do not. I do not like icons. I really do not like horizontal things that waste the valuable dimension to my monitor like title bars. This also means I prefer not to see any "helpful" panels that imagine you don’t know what you are doing and will be most comfortable painfully fumbling for guessed solutions with a mouse.

In Awesome I believe this annoying (but sort of important) menu bar thing is called the wibar.

Pavel claims to have a way to toggle the systray with a keyboard shortcut. That is acceptable.

Maybe it can just be made transparent. In theory something like this can make it 50% transparent (the 88 out of FF).

Hmm. Actually, changing theme.bg_normal to such a color in mytheme/theme.lua was a big help.

Note that this wibar stuff seems to be based on a more ancient wibox system (maybe an extension, maybe a replacement). Rumor has it that awful.wibar is a specialized wibox designed to be attached to an edge of the screen.

Note that there is a position attribute that can be left, right, top, or bottom. I also changed instances of wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal to wibox.layout.fixed.vertical. It isn’t perfect, but it’s closer to what I want.

A wibox seems to be a new client window managed by awesome. Here is official documentation about what all the pieces are called.

Awesome has quite a few layouts that you can dynamically cycle through at runtime. The sad problem is that none of them do what I want. What I want seems pretty simple and obvious — I want the screen do always divide vertically. Easy, right? A close but not quite system can be found here. This does exactly what I want until the fourth window and then it starts splitting horizontally (which I never want). It should be useful for inspiration though.

I found that if I left my default Awesome setup for too long one of the thousands of screensaverish processes that compete for attention would turn off or hibernate or suspend the screen. With new activity it would come back on, but then a very strange effect presented itself — the screen did not reflect the new actions, however, if I did a Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get to a text console and then came back to the graphical session, the things I had done were now manifest. But new actions still didn’t have any apparent effects. So basically actions were being honored, but the visible effects of them only seemed to show up when the graphics display was somehow updated in a major way.

I think I cured that with this.

Obviously this will have consequences but I don’t like my screens blanking without my explicit command.

Probably there is more to be done. Perhaps this also will help.

After making changes to the configuration files definitely check the syntax with awesome -k. That doesn’t catch all errors, but it catches the most embarrassingly stupid ones.

The Awesome FAQ has a good tip for finding where any error messages are logged.

For me that was /home/xed/.xsession-errors.