Awesome: A Lightweight and Powerful Desktop

Introduction

Awesome is a free window manager that runs on top of the X Window system on UNIX-type machines. Its goal is to remain very lightweight and offer several window layouts: maximized, floating, but also automatically placed in the form of tiles (a mode called tiling), similar to Ion.

Installation

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aptitude install awesome

Configuration

The configuration part is the most challenging aspect of Awesome. You can do really nice things provided you spend enough time on it.

Checking your configuration

First, let's make sure we have our configuration file ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua. Every time you modify it, it's wise to test your configuration before restarting awesome:

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> awesome -k ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua
? Configuration file syntax OK.

Testing your configuration

It's very convenient to test your rc.lua configuration without having to break your own desktop^1. A solution exists, which consists of launching a virtual desktop in your desktop. For this, we'll use Xephyr:

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aptitude install xserver-xephyr

Then, we'll initialize this virtual environment:

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Xephyr :1 -ac -br -noreset -screen 1152x720 &

and run our new awesome configuration (rc.lua.new):

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DISPLAY=:1.0 awesome -c ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua.new

References