Awesome
The awesome window manager lives up to its name. It is an awesome window manager, and I really enjoyed using it for like 2 to 3 years!
The Glorious Dotfiles
My awesome config is basically the floppy theme from the glorious dotfiles. Quite an elaborate setup, closer to an actual desktop environment than a window manager. They are unfortunately deprecated since 2020 (so already have been when I started using it - I guess I was hoping ^^).
I’m not gonna do a complete documentation on them here, that’d be a lot of work. Instead, check out the original wiki.
My Changes
Among others, my changes include:
- fixed an issue resulting from a newer Lua version, see here
- made left sidebar hideable (and hidden by default), moving the tag-list to the top bar
- using Charitable to imitate the way multiple monitors are handled in xmonad
- changing a couple icons to the Flat-Remix icon theme
- changing the rofi appmenu to the one from https://github.com/elenapan/dotfiles
- using pywal for wallpapers and colorscheme
- added variable to
config.luato make different settings for my two machines possible - just general customization of tags and stuff
Two different Setups
In order to have different configs on my desktop (“One”) and laptop (“IdeaPad”) like showing/hiding the battery status etc., there is a variable in the file awesome/configuration/config.lua that needs to be set. To have this variable change (and other private options) not synced to my Github, this file is put in .gitignore, and a template file awesome/configuration/config.lua.template is provided instead. So what you gotta do is:
mv awesome/configuration/config.lua.template awesome/configuration/config.luaThen configure the variable system in awesome/configuration/config.lua to the one you want:
- If you want the desktop config: set
system = One(default) - If you want the laptop config: set
system = Ideapad
Also configure the other variables in that file, like username, email, OpenWeather API key, etc.
Planned Changes
I also had a bunch of other changes planned that I never had the time to implement:
- more configuration of the side bar menu, to do things like moving windows between tags etc. from a touchscreen
- make window titlebars toggleable - I kinda started doing it, but right now if you disable them and open a new window, it’s gonna have them enabled again and it’s a whole mess
- configure Desktop right-click menu, possibly as an app launcher for touchscreen
- add list of running programs to statusbar (e.g. for unminimizing windows through the GUI)
Dependencies
Also mostly taken from here, but some things were added/removed for this config.
Required dependencies:
| Name | Description | Why/Where is it needed? |
|---|---|---|
| awesome | Highly configurable framework window manager | Main component |
| rofi | Window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement | application launcher |
| picom | A compositor for X11 | transparency and blur (specifically kawase-blur) |
| inter-font | A typeface specially designed for user interfaces | Setup font |
| charitable | Shared tags library for multiple monitors using AwesomeWM | makes multimonitor work like in xmonad |
Optional dependencies:
| Name | Description | Will be used by |
|---|---|---|
| light-git | RandR-based backlight control application | Brightness widget and OSD |
| alsa-utils, pulseaudio, pulseaudio-alsa | An alternative implementation of Linux sound support | Volume widget and OSD |
| acpi, acpid, acpi_call | Show battery status and other ACPI info | Power/Battery Widgets. No need for this if you’re not using a laptop |
| mpd | Server-side application for playing music | Music widget |
| mpc | Minimalist command line interface to MPD | Music widget |
| maim | Make image | Screenshot tool |
| feh | Image viewer and wallpaper setter | Screenshot previews, wallpapers |
| xclip | Command line interface to the X11 clipboard | Will be used in saving the screenshots to clipboard |
| xprop | Property displayer for X | Custom titlebars for each client |
| imagemagick | An image viewing/manipulation program | Music widget/Extracts hardcoded album cover from songs |
| blueman | Manages bluetooth | default launch application for bluetooth widget |
| redshift | Sets color temperature of display according to time of day | Blue light widget |
| xfce4-power-manager | Manages power | default launch application for battery widget |
| upower | upower - UPower command line tool | Battery widget |
| noto-fonts-emoji | Google Noto emoji fonts | Emoji support for notification center |
| FantasqueSansMono Nerd Font | Patched font FantasqueSansMono from the nerd-fonts library | Rofi unicode font |
| xdg-user-dirs | Manage user directories like ~/Desktop and ~/Music | xdg-folders widget |
| iproute2, iw | Manage network connection | Network widget |
| ffmpeg | Complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video | Screen Recorder Widget |
| pywal | generates a color palette from the dominant colors in an image | theme terminals, emacs, etc. with colors of wallpaper |
| Flat-Remix | icon theme inspired by material design | icons in multiple places |
Reasons why I switched
Even though I really liked awesome, I switched to qtile in 2024. Here’s a short summary why:
- I wanted to change a bunch of things, and doing so in this big elaborate config that I didn’t properly document and didn’t really fully remember the structure of seemed daunting. So I wanted to start over with a config of my own.
- I know a little bit of Python, but the tiny bit of Lua I know I learned from configuring this in 2021 or something. So switching to a window manager where I can use python seemed simpler.
- Qtile also just seemed simpler in general, making a more clear and minimal config possible (though maybe I am biased by using a big awesome config I didn’t fully understand).
- I discovered the widget system eww, which I wanted to switch to, especially for touch screen stuff (still a big work in progress ^^). So I didn’t need the broad widgeting capabilities of awesome anymore.
- Awesome has no plans to be ported to Wayland, whereas qtile already has a Wayland version. (This is a very minor reason for me though. At the time of writing this, I’m using qtile on X11.)