Configuring awesome window manager

My favorite tiling windows manager is awesome window manager (also called awesome or awesomewm). Awesome does not need mouse, everything can be performed with the keyboard and this is great when you are using a laptop.

Awesome comes complete with its own status bar and can handle a lot of things by default, but uses Lua scripting language for its configuration and, at first, could be a little messy.

So where do we start to configure it?

Preparing the configuration files

We will store our configuration file and theme under the .config/ folder in our /home

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/awesome/themes/ruben

Now, we will copy the default awesome configuration file and theme to edit them and configure to our liking.

$ sudo cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome
$ sudo cp /usr/share/awesome/themes/default/theme.lua ~/.config/awesome/themes/ruben

Configuring awesome

In this section we will edit the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua file.

Setting the theme

We need to set our theme path as the parameter passed to beautiful.init:

beautiful.init("/home/ruben/.config/awesome/themes/ruben/theme.lua")

Customizing our environment

To do this, wi will edit our ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua file, and we will configure a few sections.

Window layouts

Mostly, I only use the maximized layout, but I leave the floating layout for applications that starts with a login dialog, the calculator, and so. So in the next section I comment all the others:

 awful.layout.layouts = {
     awful.layout.suit.floating,
     -- awful.layout.suit.tile,
     -- awful.layout.suit.tile.left,
     -- awful.layout.suit.tile.bottom,
     -- awful.layout.suit.tile.top,
     -- awful.layout.suit.fair,
     -- awful.layout.suit.fair.horizontal,
     -- awful.layout.suit.spiral,
     -- awful.layout.suit.spiral.dwindle,
     awful.layout.suit.max,
     -- awful.layout.suit.max.fullscreen,
     -- awful.layout.suit.magnifier,
     -- awful.layout.suit.corner.nw,
     -- awful.layout.suit.corner.ne,
     -- awful.layout.suit.corner.sw,
     -- awful.layout.suit.corner.se,
 }

Tags

In this section we will configure the number of tags we want and their text. I only use 2 tags in each screen, and, really, I change the numbers for hack nerd font characters.

awful.tag({ "1", "2" }, s, awful.layout.layouts[1])

Menu bar launcher

I don’t use the menu bar from the wibar, neither in the mouse (I prefer the Super+p or Super+r shortcuts), so I comment the awesome menu sections:

--myawesomemenu = {
--   { "hotkeys", function() hotkeys_popup.show_help(nil, awful.screen.focused()) end },
--   { "manual", terminal .. " -e man awesome" },
--   { "edit config", editor_cmd .. " " .. awesome.conffile },
--   { "restart", awesome.restart },
--   { "quit", function() awesome.quit() end },
--}

-- local menu_awesome = { "awesome", myawesomemenu, beautiful.awesome_icon }
-- local menu_terminal = { "open terminal", terminal }

-- if has_fdo then
--    mymainmenu = freedesktop.menu.build({
--        before = { menu_awesome },
--        after =  { menu_terminal }
--    })
--else
--   mymainmenu = awful.menu({
--        items = {
--                  menu_awesome,
--                  { "Debian", debian.menu.Debian_menu.Debian },
--                  menu_terminal,
--                }
--    })
--end

--mylauncher = awful.widget.launcher({ image = beautiful.awesome_icon,
--                                     menu = mymainmenu })

-- Menubar configuration
--menubar.utils.terminal = terminal -- Set the terminal for applications that require it
-- }}}

{ -- Left widgets
    layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal,
    --mylauncher,
    s.mytaglist,
    s.mypromptbox,
},

-- root.buttons(gears.table.join(
--    awful.button({ }, 3, function () mymainmenu:toggle() end),
--    awful.button({ }, 4, awful.tag.viewnext),
--    awful.button({ }, 5, awful.tag.viewprev)
--))

--clientbuttons = gears.table.join(
--    awful.button({ }, 1, function (c)
--        c:emit_signal("request::activate", "mouse_click", {raise = true})
--    end),
--    awful.button({ modkey }, 1, function (c)
--        c:emit_signal("request::activate", "mouse_click", {raise = true})
--        awful.mouse.client.move(c)
--    end),
--    awful.button({ modkey }, 3, function (c)
--        c:emit_signal("request::activate", "mouse_click", {raise = true})
--        awful.mouse.client.resize(c)
--    end)
--)

Right widgets

In this section we will comment all the widgets that will not use, later we can add ours. I only want to keep the clock widget, so I comment the others:

{ -- Right widgets
     layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal,
     -- mykeyboardlayout,
     -- wibox.widget.systray(),
     mytextclock,
     -- s.mylayoutbox,
},

Custom key bindings

First of all I interchange the Super+j and Super+k keybinndings, is more intiutive this way for me.

One of the advantages to use a tiling window manager is have our custom shortcuts, so I always add a few. For example, if we want a shortcut to firefox, we will edit the Key bindings section and add:

awful.key({ modkey }, "f", function() awful.util.spawn("firefox") end,
          {description = "firefox", group = "internet"})

Be careful in this step. The previous entry has to end with a colon, and the last entry in this section has to end without colon.

Mapping applications to screen tags

If we want an application always running in a screen tag, we only have to set a rule. For example, if we want that MPlayer runs always in the tag 1 of screen 2:

{ rule = { class = "MPlayer" },
  properties = { screen = 2, tag = "1" } },

Removing gaps

For some reason, some windows, in maximized mode, have gaps at the right and bottom. To remove the gaps I add the size_hints_honor = false to the rules

{ rule_any = {type = { "normal", "dialog" }
  }, properties = { titlebars_enabled =  false, size_hints_honor = false }
},

Configuring our theme

In this section we will edit the our theme file, in my case: ~/.config/awesome/themes/ruben/theme.lua

Font

I find the default font a bit small, so I change it and set one a little bit bigger:

theme.font = "Hack Nerd Font Mono Regular 9"

Taglist font

I like to see the taglists very big, so I set their font to one bigger:

theme.taglist_font="Hack Nerd Font Mono Regular 16"

Wallpaper

We can set our wallpaper editing the theme.wallpaper value:

theme.wallpaper = themes_path.."ruben/background.jpg"

If we don’t have our wallpaper on the themes_path, we can set it with adding its absolute path:

theme.wallpaper = themes_path.."/home/ruben/images/wallpaper.jpg"

Widgets

We can add our widgets to end the configuration. A good startingp point is https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-widgets I usually install the following widget:

• logout-menu-widget

Custom widgets

I want to see the CPU and memory (RAM) usage, so I add a couple of custom widgets based on vicious to do it. To do this, as these widgets are based on vicious I have to add the following line at the beginning of the rc.lua file:

local vicious = require("vicious")

Then, after the following section of the rc.lua file

 -- Create a tasklist widget
    s.mytasklist = awful.widget.tasklist(s, awful.widget.tasklist.filter.currenttags, tasklist_buttons)

I add my two custom widgets:

 -- CPU widget
    cpuwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
    cpuwidget.forced_width=65
    vicious.register(cpuwidget, vicious.widgets.cpu, " CPU: $1%", 2)

 -- MEM widget
    memwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
    memwidget.forced_width=65
    vicious.register(memwidget, vicious.widgets.mem, " MEM: $1%", 2)

And then I add the two custom widgets to the wibos on the positions that I want.

Configuring the clock (mytextclock or textclock) format:

I only want to see the hour and the minutes. If you, as me, want another time format you only need to pass the date format to the textclock() function:

mytextclock = wibox.widget.textclock(" %H:%M ")

The formats are the same as in the linux date command

My own widgets (ip and hackthebox)

You also may find interesting my own awesome widgets:

• awesome ip widget
• awesome htb widget

GTK applications with dark theme

For personal reasons I usually work with dark themes, but awesome does not have one, is not its job.
If you, as me, want applications in dark mode and you have installed gtk applications, you only have to modify the settings.ini files contained in the gtk-*.*/ directories under ~./config and set:

gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1

Default browser

If we have many browsers installed and we want to use one of them as default browser, for instance firefox, we will find that some applications will open the links in another browser. To solve this we will need to set the default browser, system-wide and user-specific. For instance, in debian:

System-wide

$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

User-specific

$ xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox-esr.desktop

Backup and clean

When we have awesome running configured to our liking, we can make a backup of our configuration files and themes, then we can remove the commented lines and their associated sections and/or declarations. This way we will have a (slightly) lighter configuration and window manager and, with our backup, we can always go back in case something goes wrong.

Further readings

• My first awesome
• awesome - ArchWiki
• awesome recipes
• Debian Wiki - Awesome

Autostart applications

If we want execute applications and/or scripts when our awesome starts, we have to add it at the end of the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua, e.g.:

-- Autostart
awful.spawn.with_shell("~/scripts/my_config_script")

Enjoy! ;)