My AwesomeWM Configuration

[Music] hey everybody what's going on welcome back to another new video today I want to take a look at awesome window manager Jack and with the config and trying to get it a little more like something that I want to be using quick note I'm sure there's a bit of like echoing in this video certainly much more than normal I know it's an issue I'm not sure how much of it I'll be able to remove after the fact but you know bear with me for a second all definitely we'll be fixing that as soon as I can but for now we'll just do it so awesome window manager probably the first thing that we will want to do is change the wallpaper yeah I mean there's a lot of things we want to do here but I'm just gonna pick something at random so we'll start with fixing any wallpapers so normally the ideal way that awesome would work is if you right-click you have a little menu here also if you click up here in the top corner you have a menu here and you can launch a couple apps and things and that doesn't really work out a default unless you have I believe it's xterm installed I do not I have three terminals on the system I've got a kitty I've got alacrity and I've got two termite so what I need to do is launch one of those and so there's two keyboard shortcuts I'll tell you and just kind of remember them if you don't remember them use this menu up here and just launch hotkeys that's one of the two keyboard shortcuts Super S or command S or Windows key s whatever will launch a menu where you can see all of the available keyboard shortcuts that you have and when you launch that you'll see another one here super or that will allow you to run applications so what we'll do here is we'll type in super R and we will launch a terminal and the first thing we're gonna want to do here is well first thing we don't want to do here is make the text a bit bigger here and then we're gonna run pack or sudo pac-man - s and install a program called in nitrogen now this is a wallpaper setter pretty basic go over to a new screen here and we will do command or again and type in nitrogen to run that and you can see here normally this takes a little bit of setup all you need to do is go over to preferences and you're going to type in like hit add and then just pick a directory now in my case I've got a git repository where I store a lot of wallpapers and I just pulled that down and link that up so now we can pick a wallpaper I'm gonna change the mood to zoomed fill I find that works pretty well and then let's pick a wallpaper that'll look nice those one it just download yeah there it is yeah I thought this one would look good for the video yeah there it is a good wallpaper like that one a lot okay cool we can go and close that out come back over here to our terminal and what we can do is we can now actually you find a way to edit that config file so what you want to do is in your home directory type CD to make your figure in your home directory you're gonna make a directory call it's dot config chances are you already have that directory if you don't make it and then you're gonna change directory into that config folder and inside of this what you want to do is create a directory called awesome so you'll do make dear call it awesome and then you can you know CD into that directory if you want to there's nothing inside well it wouldn't be anything inside ignore this for a second we'll get back to that in a second but what we need to do is copy over a sample config that we can mess with and luckily we've got one our system so we're gonna do is we're gonna do CP that's the copy command and we're gonna copy from Etsy xdg awesome and then the file in here called RC Lua and what we want to do is just copy that into our home directory so that's tilde slash Tilda's right above tab on those keyboard typing config awesome drop it straight into that folder we just created now if we list the files in this folder we have one called RC Lua now use any text editor you like I don't have any sort of GUI text editors I could install one real quick probably will do G edit this one should install pretty quickly and I'm doing this just to point out or just point out that if you wanted to open this in a GUI editor it would be pretty easy you would type in the name of the editor and then you would type in the location blue make sure you spell the name of the editor right let me config awesome RC Lua okay oh there it is cool okay that did work and then we can edit the config and like Adam or GE editor vs code or whatever you might want to use of course I'm not really into that so close without saving any changes come back to our terminal and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use vim so I will add a config awesome RC loop a couple of things we're gonna want to do pretty much immediately let's go all the way down to the bottom of the file and I feel like I made this fun just way too big here so maybe we can scale that down one or two notches if that's not big enough I'm sorry I'm let's create a new line here the first thing that we might want to do is like add gaps to the window so that we can sort of see the the wallpaper underneath it so what we could do is we could run I'll create a comment we'll do two dashes and I'll just say gaps and then what we can do is we would type in beautiful dot useless whoops useless underscore gap equals and give it a number I'm not sure if his values in pixels or points or what but five tends to work pretty well for me save those changes and then if we hit command s again to bring up our shortcuts we have a shortcut here very handy one whoops control super are that will reload the awesome window manager control super are it's gonna trip a bit but then at some point if we run a window we'll have gaps in it very nice okay so there we go okay now a guy gap is working okay so next thing we might want to do is let me reset our wallpaper here real quick all right and then the next thing you could do is we'll have some apps auto start so a couple of examples that come to mind pretty immediately the first of which would be like nitrogen that wallpaper setter will probably want that to relaunch every time so we don't have to constantly reset our wallpaper you know maybe something like Dropbox would be handy to have launched all the time and then we'll do something called PI comm or in some distributions it might be called Compton and what this is is a renderer or like compositor I don't really know exactly what you would call it it's it's a program that's gonna enable transparency in our terminal which if I were to open up something like my termite config should have a transparency and naval if we go to the background color you can see here I have a transparency value set for this terminal that I'm using and that's the same in Kitty or alacrity or really any terminal that I would use looks a bit nicer in the videos and you know I like it to look nice in general so anyways that's not working right now so we need to turn on so first thing we'll do is let's launch a new terminal and then we can do pack or pack sudo pac-man digest and install pike home again on arch it's called pi comm I believe on bun - it's called Compton and probably a few other things but we're gonna install pi comm let that do its thing and then we'll have this auto watch when we start the awesome window man so the way that we do that is with the command here it's gonna be called awful dot spawn dot with underscore shell and it with some parentheses and add some quotes in there and we'll just make a couple of copies of that line and then we'll come in here and the first thing we'll add is we'll add PI comm and then we'll add drop box because I wanted that to launch as well and then we'll launch nitrogen now when we just launch nitrogen this is gonna create a problem and I'll just like gin or I'll just reload alacrity or awesome to show you what that problem is so again it's control super R to reload awesome and you can see that what it does is it just launches the nitrogen app over here on my first window which isn't really what I want it to do what I actually wanted to do is I wanted to do a couple of different things it could restore the last wallpaper that I said or what I wanted to do is I wanted to pick a random wallpaper for me so let me grab a wallpaper here I'll just do a random one there okay and hop back over here our terminals and you will see I do have transparency now very nice and the easiest way to probably do this would be to run something like nitrogen - - restore and this is probably what most people will run and the way that this works if we open up a new terminal and we take a look at the man page for the nitrogen you can see oh maybe there we go that's probably a little more readable if we run it with the option restore it's literally just gonna restore the last picture that we set up but a couple other things we can do with this that I think are pretty interesting one is it's very interesting is we can one set the mood for the wallpaper so like set whether we want it to be zoomed or tiled or scaled or whatever else and then something else we can do there's a flag here - - random which is very very nice so let's do that exactly so what we'll do is rather than just typing in restore we'll change this to random and I'm just gonna do a favor and save you some time here it took me a little while to figure out what the issue here was after you do the random flag you need to give a location for it to pool pictures from it doesn't just remember whatever locations you've put into the nitrogen app I do not know why so what we'll do is we'll go into this folder where I have my wallpaper stored and I'll just give it that directory and then whenever we will reload awesome it should pick a random wallpaper and set it for us which is phenomenal great um one other thing you might do is if I go into my or you know batch config whatever shell you might be using I set up an alias here that runs this exact same command just every time I type W so if I just take W in a terminal I can set myself a new wallpaper really easily oh one more thing we probably should do down here is I'm going to come to the beginning of this nitrogen line and I'm gonna say - - whoops - - set zoom fill and I'll make sure it's sort of rendering the wallpaper the way that we want it - that should be good um okay so next thing we want to do there's a thing and alacrity here called sloppy focus and let me give you a little demo here we open up another window as I move the mouse the focus of the window manager will follow the mouse and that's probably sort of handy I freaking hate it I don't know I bumped the mouse way too often and it moves my focus I'd rather just have to manually trigger it or one thing you can do if we go ahead and turn sloppy focus off is you can still trigger it with the mouse by just clicking on the window it's just not gonna follow your mouse automatically so you'll notice I bring that up because it's right here towards the bottom of the config you have a comment called a naval sloppy focus and this is the code right here that enables that functionality you could just search through the config for sloppy focus and then once you find it what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to comment the whole thing out and then if I reload awesome again we can no longer than the focus will no longer follow our mouse we're going to have to actually click to do it or use some keyboard shortcuts command or super J&K are shortcuts for that that will allow you to quickly sort of change focus focus points next up you'll notice probably a little bit of an issue whenever I reloaded alacrity there let me do it again to demonstrate here we'll reload alacrity and if we come over here our windows are on top of each other and that's because awesome window manager is always starting in this floating mode it has several modes that we can use but it's always starting the floating mode for some reason so I'm having to come up here and click to the next mode in order to get these to sort of stack each other properly I have no idea why that's the default behavior that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that anyone here used as a tiling window manager would want but we can fix it pretty easily by going down in the config a bit what we're looking for is a section here called I don't even know what it would be called oh here we go awful layout so you could just search awful down layout and you'll notice here this just lists every type of layout that we can do so what I'll do is I'll come in here to this floating layout and I will immediately just comment it out and what I'll actually do is I'm gonna comment out every layout other than the one that I want to use so that I don't ever accidentally trigger a layout that I don't want so I'm just gonna pick this tile layout here and then what I can do it is I'll come down to all of the other layout types here and comment them out so that they can't ever be accidentally used so then we can reload again and if we come over here to our second window everything's still gonna look good it will reset like any custom sizing that you do but you know that's just kind of how it works um now while we're up here right above the awful layout status we can fix a little bit of an issue that we're having by default there is a shortcut to launch you can right-click or go up to this menu and do open terminal but if you look at this shortcuts there's also a case command or a shortcut here super enter to open a terminal that's very handy but it's looking for X term and we don't have that so let's go and just change that to termite and what we're here we'll change our editor doesn't whatever we'd like to use you know do atom or vs code or whatever but I'm gonna do in vim my editor save the changes reload and then if we do command our super enter we will be launching a new terminal very nice and the next thing I want to do is I want to get rid of title bars in the setup here so if I search for Oh probably title bars here it is add title bars to normal clients and dialogues there's a couple of different places where title bar is gonna come up in the config here and what I want to do is just sort of delete them all or you can comment them all out if you think you might want to turn this back on at some point but I'm like dead positive I'm never gonna want idle parts I just think they're kind of ugly that's one of the major roles of a tiling window manager for me actually title yeah we don't need that that's something else okay save this changes control command R and now we have new title bars and that's gonna be true of any apps that we launch we can launch as many terminals we want they'll be this super kind of slick sexy new title bar look we could even launch something like a browser a Firefox for example so let's open up Firefox and hey no title bars what's the command to closed by default I don't remember a shift super C shift supersuit there it is cool yeah I did not know that and the reason I didn't know that is because I've jacked with a lot of the keyboard shortcuts not a lot of them but a fair few so let's go ahead and do that I want to come down and I'm gonna search for the run prompt oh here we go here's the bit right here so so you can see here we have a setting here called prompt and it's saying when we hit command R is gonna do the run prompt I kind of hate the default run prompt here it's really bad because you have to type in the exact you know name of an app to launch it you know if I launch nitrogen I have to tie nitrogen all the way out completely finished typing before I can do anything else with it that's really bad in my opinion and there's a lot of good alternatives probably one of the more popular ones and the one that I've been using so far is one called demon you you can do pack s demon you to install it and then you can run a budget typing in D menu underscore blob and you'll see it pops up right here and now if I want to type in nitrogen I hit the first couple of letters it knows what I'm doing I hit inner app is launched so let's make that happen over here first thing we want to do is let's Jack with the function a bit here you can see the function is basically this bit right here and it's running my prompt slash one whole bunch of stuff what we want to do is just sort of delete all of this until we get down to this intersection here you know maybe we'll just move the end thing down to a new line and what we can do is in front of that we can type awful util dot spawn and this is how we'll launch an app and then what would do is inside of this I'll just do some parentheses as quotes and we'll do D menu run okay the way that these sort of things work is you have two lines usually in for a keyboard shortcut you have a description and then you have a line that has the actual command that you're gonna run and a shortcut I've moved it down to three lines because I think it's a bit simpler that way so this third line here is the description and that is how this will look if we do that super s menu so if I were to change the description here to launch D menu and then I change the group to my name it will create a custom group called Mak C and then what it will do is show me the description that I've typed in here and then what I can do is up here the shortcut is mod key just the standard monkey that's mod for the super key and then R is going to run the function or will not the function but whatever is before this end thing which in this case is awful by you till about spawn demon you run it's just gonna run demon you force this should be much better but I want to change that r2 space so that whenever I do super space it runs and then we'll just change that to D menu save all the changes ctrl command R and then if we do super space and we turn it along to Firefox there we go now speaking of launching firebox we could probably do that a bit it's quicker so let's make a copy of this put it down there change this to Firefox and then we're gonna change the command here to Firefox and we're gonna change these shortcuts to be try and relive that again come over here we'll do superbee that'll launch Firefox for us very nice they're not really too many other shortcuts that I jacked with or anything I remember there was one that I was doing if I search for like close there's a yeah shift C or what is it it's super shift C mod key shift C to close a window I don't like that I'm gonna change that to Q and I'm gonna get rid of the shift there so that I can just close windows with super Q that's how it works on Mac OS by default and then if I come over here we'll set another wallpaper and if I do command Q or super Q yeah that closes windows now that's pretty handy there's a couple of other things probably but for the most part I'm happy with this setup there's just one more thing I want to talk about and that's floating windows so by default I mean launch ax and you stop trying to launch a browser and let me find something else to launch here maybe we can launch an instance of maybe just a different you know we can just launch a couple extra terminals okay so a couple extra terminals here um there is a shortcut here that's super handy it is shift command space or shift super space and what that will do is trigger floating mode for Windows and that's really nothing you can just sort of float a window whenever you want to but the issue is we don't have a good way to move this around since we don't have the title bars anymore this is like the one spot where title bars are actually helping us so we want to fix for that and there were a lot of different fixes that we use but they're the one that I found if I open up a browser here let me open up maybe a cute browser I found a plugin for awesome window manager I guess is what it would be this was super wild yeah I hear this here's the guy that made l13 or whatever it is and this is a freaking app or like an additional plug-in that works with awesome window manager and allows you to move around these floating windows it was like the simplest solution I could find and it's also super easy to do so all you need to do is clone this git repository into your awesome window manager config so let me get out of this if we go into config awesome all you would have to do is type in git clone and then this web address here I'll leave a link in the description but you can see I've already done that and then what you want to do is you want to go into your RC Lua file and you want to add right up here at the top where we're getting packages to use I put it right down here below this autofocus thing we're just gonna type in require underscore or parenthesis and then inside is some quotes we're just going to type in collusion or collision it's so not coluche collision and then we'll close that up with some extra parentheses and by the way that was just right there on the github repo where you were supposed to type that just sort of remembered it so then if we reload if we launch another terminal for example I'll do ctrl super space to get an into floating mode I've got a couple of very handy controls now one is if we do shift super and in the arrow keys we can move around this floating window to wherever we want if we do I think it's command alt in the arrow keys we can sort of expand the window a bit and if we have a shift into that we can shrink it down some okay and again shift command will just sort of mess with it um there's a lot of other keyboard shortcuts I think there's some that you can snap it to corners with yeah there it is um look around on the get up page again I'll leave link in the description and that will be good oh we get some kind of error here huh I don't know what that was let me reload awesome again and see if we get the same problem command bar no we don't have the issue I don't know what that most maybe it was just something weird I did with that plugin okay there we go I think that's it for this video everybody so thank you everyone for checking it out hope you if you're also using awesome manners itself Giada bit I didn't find this particularly difficult to get set up which is great there's plenty of other window managers that are quite quite a bit more difficult to get set up there were some that I logged into and though it's just like a black screen and I know you have to sort of know how to launch a terminal and stuff with it and you know there's some stuff there's ways to do it it's no big deal but this was super user friendly but it's nice to be able to configure it a bit and make it a bit easier to use and so that's that thank you everyone for checking out this video I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next one hopefully with a bit less echoes [Music]

Channel: MAKC

Views: 65,033

Keywords: Mackenzie, Criswell, Rendaa, Studios, Motion, Mile, Livingston, TX, Texas, Motion Graphics, Web Design, Graphic, After Effects, Photoshop, Atom, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Code, Learn, Tutorial, Guide, Instructions, UX, vim, emacs, bookbinding, books, film, premier, adobe, avid, media composer, Neovim, eMacs, Unix, arch, bad, manjaro

Id: nC_e8Gw1XlA

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020