Description

awesome is a floating and tiling window manager initialy based on a dwm code rewriting. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome.

Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating… Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose.

If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager.

Concepts

Tiled layout

With tiled layout, windows are managed in a master and a stacking area. The master area contains the windows which currently need most attention, whereas the stacking area contains all other windows. The master area can be splited in several rows and column, as you want.

Maximized layout

Each window is resized to take full screen space.

Floating layout

In floating layout, windows can be resized and moved freely, just like a usual window manager. Dialog windows are always managed floating, regardless of the layout selected.

Tags

Windows are grouped by tags. Each window can be tagged with one or multiple tags. Selecting certain tags displays all windows with those tags. Each tag can have its own layout.

Tags can be compared to virtual desktops, but it's more powerful: you can quickly merge and show several tags at the same time, and go back to only one tag after.

Status bar

awesome contains a small status bar which can contain a lot of widget: display all available tags, current layout, tasklists, texts, icons, graphs, progress bars. Each widget can have its own configuration and mouse bindings.

awesome draws a small border around windows to indicate their focus state.

Configuration

Every aspect of awesome is configurable via a configuration file: awesomerc.

Features and non-features

In contrast to ion, larswm, wmii, or dwm, awesome is much, pick 2 from that list: smaller, faster, simpler or awesome.

• Very stable.
• No mouse needed: everything can be performed with keyboard.
• Multihead support (XRandR, Xinerama or Zaphod mode).
• EWMH support.
• Some real transparency support (using Composite extension and xcompmgr for now).
• No Lua integration, no 9P support, no editable tagbars.
• No limit on its source size: awesome has features we want.
• Doesn't distinguish between layers: there is no floating or tiled layer. Whether or not the clients of currently selected tag(s) are in tiled layout, you can rearrange them on the fly. Popup and fixed-size windows are always floating, however.
• Customized through editing a configuration file, which makes it extremely easy to configure. You don't have to learn Lua/sh/ruby or some weird configuration file format (like X resource files), or recompile source code each time you do something: just edit the configuration file, for god's sake.
• Each function for manipulating environment is bindable to keys shortcut, mouse buttons or executable remotely via a socket (awesome-client).

This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!