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Awesome window manager revisited

One year ago I wrote a small article about my usage of the awesome window manager. Specifics of awesome and benefits of using it (or tiling window managers in general) I would rather leave for another article. In this one I'd like to revisit some of my projects and code related to awesome. Last year I just upgraded from v2 to v3 which introduced the Lua programming language as a way of configuring and extending awesome. My goal then was to create an identical environment as I had with v2. One of the major obstacles was replacing the Ruby widget library called Amazing with a Lua one called Wicked. I still remember my first widgets, knowing very little Lua I had to resort to Awk to grab battery or mbox information. At the time I just started visiting the #awesome IRC channel on OFTC. I clearly remember someone saying "it would be nicer if it was in Lua"...

A year has passed, so what has changed? Previously I wrote about vicious, a modular widget library written in Lua which builds on the foundations laid down by Wicked. I had certain ideas about widgets that were not shared by a lot of people, so I had to do it for myself. Making Wicked modular would have been a big design change, and on top of that I wasn't confident enough in my Lua so I decided not to contribute back, but to create a new project. Now I am very satisfied how it turned out, I'm satisfied with the code and with contributions of other users. Result is a series of Lua modules that gather data about your system, basically system monitors like those provided by Conky... at the moment we use them to feed awesome widgets but they could be used in other places just as easy. For example one could use them for populating the Ion window manager status-bar. I made the project public sometime in June, it now counts 25+ widget types and gets 10+ downloads daily. It's hard to make an estimate about the number of actual users, but the code was downloaded well over 700 times.

Since I published the vicious git repository I wanted to use the git web interface for more than just those few files, so I put my awesome configuration in git and started pushing the changes. This easy access, a lot of custom (and well commented) code and my solutions to various usability problems quickly made my awesome-configs repo into a very popular starting point for new awesomers. It gets almost as much clone requests and downloads as the vicious repository. My Zenburn theme also became very popular, in fact so popular that from v3.4 it is a part of the awesome distribution. That's not all I contributed to the awesome tree, in recent months I started sending more and more code contributions... I contributed to other open source projects but I'm very proud of being a part of this one. It has a lot of users, most of which are experienced Unix users with an interest in improving their productivity and desktop usability. As someone said on IRC just yesterday "awesome is the ultimate sysadmin console".

One of my modules that is just gaining some attention is the Scratchpad manager. It brings back functionality that was present in v2, but also expands on it by providing a drop-down applications manager, contributed by the author of Wicked. Former Ion users will also be familiar with the scratch.pad functionality, while the scratch.drop module allows users to have their favorite terminal emulator, or application launcher like gmrun, slide in from a screen edge. Another useful module that can be found in my repo is the On-Screen Keyboard, initially written by another awesome user, which I ported to v3.4. You can see it in action in this screenshot.

Finally let's see what other users have been up to. The author of Wicked wrote Eminent - a dynamic tagging library (its functionality will be familiar to WMII users) and Rodentbane - which allows for rapid control of the mouse pointer using only the keyboard. Other notable modules are Revelation (implementing OSX like expose), Shifty (dynamic tagging with advanced client matching) and Obvious (another widget library). With this I conclude my little tour of planet awesome.