Awesome 3.4-rc* and default floating layout

Rodrigo — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:45:56 +0000

I think awesome wm is, well awesome. I tried the last rc but I found that all the tags were set to the floating layout by default, so digging through the internet I found these bug that is exactly what was happening to me:

For the lazy ones, here is the solution:

Change:
tags[s] = awful.tag({ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 }, s)

to:
tags[s] = awful.tag({ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 }, s, layouts[1])

taken shamelessly from the ticket.

Awesome wm: my first steps

Rodrigo — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:38:07 +0000

A tiling WM maximizes the use of your screen real state by handling
the space as a grid where each window (or frame) gets a piece of it in
a non-overlapping way. An additional, but not exclusive, feature found
on most of this wm is that you can do almost everything using keyboard
only.

I have a widescreen monitor and with the extra horizontal space I can
arrange two windows side-to-side without losing too much info, and if
you have some of those massive 20+ inches lcd monitors, you have a lot
of space. I still consider a 17 inches monitor to be big… I’ve
been using 14′ monitor for almost my entire life

They are a lot of tiling WM, check the Wikipedia article for a
list of the most common. I decided to try awesome 3 a couple of
months ago and I don’t regret a bit.

First step: don’t forget about that Windows(r) key

When you open awesome for the first time, all you get is a dark theme,
with a gray wallpaper. You will have a statusbar on the top with a
clock on the right, a weird icon next to it and some numbers on the
left (1..9).

First thing first, the magic key here is the “Windows Key” that
almost all the PC keyboards have, and the behavior is based on Vi, the text editor. From now on the “Windows key” will be just
modkey.

Open your apps

To create a new terminal window all you need to do is press
modkey+Enter. To open a different app you could create your own
shortcut (but we are not there yet) or press modkey+F1. That will
create a prompt on the statusbar where you can insert your command
(e.g. “firefox”).

Moving

Now, if you have several windows open you can circle them using
modkey+j and modkey+k. If you want to move between “tags” use
modkey+left or modkey+right (arrow keys).

Changing window sizes

Using the default layout, there will be a “main window” on the left
that will take half of the screen and all the other windows will be
confined to the right. With modkey+h and modkey+l you can change
how much space is dedicated for each of this “groups”.

What if you want a single window to take the whole screen temporarily?
Use modkey+m

That’s it!

I have some trouble getting starting with awesome (specially because
googling for awesome doesn’t help much), so I hope this would help
somebody else trying to use awesome for the first time.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop, click for a full size version.

Awesome and xrandr

Rodrigo — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:01:33 +0000

I use (the) awesome window manager. If you haven’t heard of it, you are missing a great window manager. It can deal with tiling and floating windows, is very customizable and is the best wm I’ve tried (over openbox, fluxbox, xfce, gnome’s, enlightenment, etc.) Go to it’s website to learn more.

This post is because I’ve been trying it’s support for multiple displays and is great!, Right now I have my laptop and monitor working together in a down-up configuration, and awesome have keybindings for handling the different displays. Absolutely great.

If you are a keyboard freak like me you will enjoy it!!

rlazo's blog » Awesome