AwesomeWM: So Long BSPWM, It's Been Fun

since it's a new year i thought hey why don't we go and try out a new window manager because i'm pretty sure i switched to bspwm roughly around january 2020 so maybe i just make this a trend and every year every six months i try out something new so a couple of guys my discord convinced me to try something out and i recently switched over to awesome wm there was a lot of choices out there i could have gone with but this is the one that i decided to try out first it does look different to the way it looks with the default config but really i've only done some very minor things to it so what we're going to be doing today is looking at my first impressions basically all i've done to it is added in some sensible key bindings because by default supershift q which in bspwm i use to kill a window is bound to kill the window manager which you can probably imagine how that went for me and some other little things like removing pointless window decorations because by default there's like a bar up the top and you can like close out a window and things like that i don't need that also has like the window name as well which also is kind of pointless basically the only time you need to see the window name is when it's a floating window so you can actually grab the window to move it around and also i cleaned out some useless bindings and useless things in the status bar like the start menu which i'm never gonna use and i think there's a button you can press to actually bring up a list of your keybindings once again i've never gonna use that i know my key bindings i don't need an extra binding for my bindings now you might be wondering what is awesome wm and why is it special so awesome wm is a dynamic tiling window manager basically that means they can operate in a tiling mode or it can also operate in a floating mode but unlike something like bspwm it has a very heavy focus on layouts now a lot of these layouts are going to seem very similar to you and that's because this initially started as a fork of dwm but one of the major benefits it has over dwm is how to configure it and that's because instead of relying on you know c files to actually modify the source code you go and modify these lua files and that's how you actually configure it so as long as you know lua you can basically control everything this window manager does sadly i don't really know lore at this point outside of the little bit of configuration i've done so i'm still very much learning it as i go now the first thing i noticed between this and bspwm is the way that it actually handles tiling so awesome wm very strictly follows layouts whereas in bspwm you can sort of do layouts but most of the layouts that come default with it are relative to where you're actually spawning the window from so say i wanted to split a window off of this node right here it would do the tiling based off of this window and i ran it in a spiral layout so it would spiral from where i'm at whereas even with the spiraling layout inside of awesome which is this one right here it doesn't actually care which window you're actually focused on it's always going to spawn the window in the next spot of the spiral so in this case it's going to be right here spawn another one it's going to be here again again again it doesn't actually care where you're focused at the reason for this difference is that bspwm is this weird hybrid between a dynamic tiler and a manual tile i saw emmanuel tyler basically you have complete control over exactly where the windows are going to be placed and a dynamic toilet is what we have here where you have layouts that you're working with basically it does both of these it doesn't do either of them exceptionally well but it does have its own sort of unique workflow but you know what i really do miss just having these strict layouts like i3 does and going from there it is nice to know exactly where my windows are always going to spawn even though it was a little bit difficult to get used to again if i do just want to break the layout completely i always have the option of just making floating windows and then placing them exactly where i want them to be placed and i don't really particularly mind the way floating is done here i kind of prefer the way that bspwm has it where you just have like a hotkey and then when you press the hotkey then you can do your window manipulation but having the bar here is kind of a decent compromise and i can get used to it again but typically i'll just be running it like this with like maybe three other nodes besides the master node i'll usually have one master node i guess i can like increase the number and have like this grid layout this might make more sense for certain tasks but usually it's just the one master node and then i'll have something like a media player here and maybe something for notes and then some other thing maybe but that's usually the most i'll go because this is basically dwm we don't actually have access to different desktops what we have instead are numbered tags now this might look like desktop one and you can use these to basically work the exact same way as desktops in other window managers but they do have a fundamental difference so let's say that we have this h-top window on my second tag and then all of these other windows on my first tag normally what you'd have to do is move that window over to the desktop you're on and then move it back when you're done but you don't actually have to do that here because what you can do is temporarily show it on the same tag you're on while it still exists on a different tag personally though i've been working with things like i3 and bspwm for so long that i don't really know if i would actually get used to working with a feature like this but i should try it out and see how it actually fits into my workflow now as for key binding as you would expect it's done inside of the rc.lua file obviously done in lua now there's two ways you can go about doing keybinding you have the awesome way and you have my way and i prefer to do it my way so basically what i've done is everything specifically related to awesome wms doing things like modifying window sizes reloading awesome modifying the number of masternodes running lua code making floating windows everything specifically related to window management is done inside of the lua configuration everything else though i've kept inside of sxhkd now the reason why i've done this is because i want it to be easy to switch to a different window manager and if i ever decide to say go back to bspwm i want to have a working configuration already there rather than having to build it up again from scratch and even if i don't delete my sxhkd configuration over time they will start to diverge from each other maybe i'll try out new applications add new bindings in so for me it's much easier to just maintain the sxhd configuration and maintain the rc.lua file even though yes it is going to be slightly slower it's going to use a fraction of a percent of more cpu and a little bit more ram i don't really care about that it's not really that much of a performance here as for the launcher i'm well aware the awesome does come with a built-in launcher i haven't really used it that much i've used it for like five minutes i might go back and actually use it properly but for now what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be sticking with d menu now the reason why i'm doing that is because i'm using d menu for far more than just an application launcher also using it for doing things like opening up config files and opening up my bookmarks and i don't want to have to go and modify all of this stuff just so it can work inside of awesome and then go and modify it again or maintain two versions of it if i switch to anything else it's much easier just to keep going with d menu and just make it fit inside of awesome instead now i did mention i didn't really do much in the way of theming but you can probably already see that it basically fits my theme anyway because the way i theme my system is so very very basic pretty much once i actually go and theme this the only difference you're going to see is instead of having this like light gray box up here it's going to be a little bit blue so am i not really taking advantage of all of the theme that you can actually do inside of awesome absolutely and that's because i don't really care i've never really been much of a theming person i like having a very minimal theme with the font that i like and the colors that i like and that's about it if you want something that's like unix porn go and look at the unix pawn subreddit you're not going to get that from me there's already plenty of those desktops out there so if you want to go and you know download one of their config files go ahead and do that i'm not going to build that for you now one thing i actually am using that is built into awesome is the bar up here so i'm not using my polybar like i did on bspwm and i'm probably going to stick with this because i actually really like some of the stuff you get from using the awesome bar i haven't fully explored it yet but from what i've seen it seems to have much better mouse support than what existed inside a polybar so say i wanted to go and click on this up here that will actually go and minimize that and minimize this one here and then i can go and click it again and bring them back honestly that is all i really need from it but i will properly explore it at some point and because it's actually built into awesome it has much more integration into how awesome actually works rather than trying to hack stuff into polybar to make it sort of function now i'm not sure which modules i'll actually bring over from my polybar because a lot of the stuff i had in it i don't necessarily need to have there for example i had things like my weather in there and i had my cpu usage and my cpu temps if i wanted to check those things there are other ways i can go and check them i might keep my number of packages i have to install that does seem to be pretty useful but i can probably slim the bar down massively from what it was either way though i will be adding in some new modules and actually trying to learn lua for myself and seeing what it can actually do i have been reading a bit of the awesome wm documentation and that is how i worked out how to have these window gaps here if you aren't actually sure and you do run awesome right now basically what you can go and do is enable something called useless gaps and basically they're useless gaps the only problem i have found so far is related to playing games in full screen so when i'm streaming there are reasons why i might want to break my mouse cursor outside of the full screen game window in bspwm there was a very consistent way to actually go and do this inside of awesome it seems like it works maybe 50 of the time basically what i try to do is force my mouse cursor over to the other screen sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't i'm not really sure what the deal is there so i might be missing something but once i work that out i shouldn't really have any issues actually working with awesome it seems like games on steam are playing perfectly fine with it i did notice in the case of borderlands the pre-sequel which is kind of buggy inside a proton at one point it actually tried to spawn in a window that looked like this rather than being in full screen mode and then try to cram 1920 by 1080 into this space here which was quite amusing and you can go see that on my gaming channel so if there's anything you want to see me try out with awesome or any videos you want me to do on it feel free to let me know in the comment section down below i'm not really sure where i'm going to go with it right now for now i'm probably going to just you know work on my configuration make it feel nice for me and then from there i will start doing some random videos here and there but i'm more than happy to take some suggestions thank you guys for watching before i go i would like to thank my supporters so a special thank you too i should probably just bring up the list before i actually start talking a special thank you to chris joachim donald michael andre nathan david montez i will chico bender joseph mitchell pitaday tony tushar and all my two dollar supporters if you'd like to go support my work there's some links down below to my patreon subscribe star leave replay all that sort of stuff i've got my podcast check over t available basically anywhere and then this channel available on odyssey library and bit shoot if you want to watch on the platform that isn't youtube so i think that's gonna be pretty much everything for me and i'm out [Music] you

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 13,515

Keywords: brodie robertson, awesome, awesomewm, awesome window manager, awesome window manager arch linux, awesomewm first impressions, awesome vs i3, awesomewm vs i3, awesomewm vs i3wm, brodie robertson bspwm, brodie robertson awesomewm, awesomewm arch, awesomewm arch linux, best window manager, linux window manager, linux window managers, best linux window manager, awesomewm vs dwm, dwm vs awesomewm, bspwm vs awesomewm, arch linux, arch linux bspwm, brodie robertson linux

Id: k2ArWwGN7lM

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021