What is Reddit's opinion of
awesome?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
The first link looks kind of like Awesome. Not sure though. To answer your second question, Arch doesn't have a default WM/DE. You install whatever you want after setting up the initial system.
Arch Wiki: Window Managers.
Here's a comment I posted earlier, about terminals that support asking before pasting multiple lines:
>Are tiling window managers worth it?
Yes. I switched to using Awesome WM about 1 year and a half ago and I have never looked back.
I used to love Gnome 2. I had 8 virtual desktops, and each served it's purpose (code, web, irc, etc). I also had a bunch of custom keybindings that could snap windows to certain portions of my screen. In essence, I was already using a tiling wm, I just didn't know it yet.
When Gnome 3 came out (or whatever flavor shipped with Fedora 16), I was horrified. They (in my own personal opinion) completely broke the virtual desktop metaphor. The whole desktop "stacking" system and application switching just felt broken to me.
This is when I switched. Previously, I would lurk in some of the screenshot threads, and it looked like people were doing some really cool things with Awesome. I installed it from the repos and started using it.
I fell in love instantly. I used 9 virtual desktops (or "tags" in Awesome's vocab), and once more there was order for my workflow(s). In my opinion, a desktop manager is doing it's job correctly when I don't notice that I'm using one. It should be as low-clutter & low-bs as possible. Awesome was able to do that for me.
That being said, there were some downsides; After ripping Gnome out of my system, I realized just how much it handled. Functionality like volume control, brightness control, battery display, & screensaver stuff had to be re-integrated. This was not too difficult, and I got to learn Lua in the process.
Overall, I highly recommend that everyone at least try Awesome. It's perfect for anyone who is looking for a highly-customizable and low-bs window manager.
Everyone loves screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/Gl55J.png
> I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion, but IMO tiling WMs such as http://awesome.naquadah.org/ are the only sensible UI. I just don't get why anyone would want to spend time positioning windows.
I don't know about anyone else, but at least for me the answer to that is simple:
Because when it comes to positioning my windows, I get it right 100% of the time, and tiling WMs do not.
Every automatic tiling WM that I've used gets it "wrong" some percentage of the time, and a system that's mostly automatic but really grating when it's not is (IMHO) inferior to a system that's manual, yet not uncomfortable to use.
Ah, but why not use a manual tiling WM?
Well, I tried that. But here's the thing: I don't need to see all my windows all at once. I often want to see arbitrary combinations of parts of ones. Yes, I can do that with a tiling WM -- but keyboard shortcuts are a little cumbersome for me when compared to KWin set up the way that I want: Alt+Drag to resize, snap to window edges, desktop edge resistance, etc.
So yes, I could use a tiling WM, but it's an inferior solution for me as I'd have to spend more time managing windows only to end up with a less efficient layout.
awesome is awesome http://awesome.naquadah.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome I linked archwiki because it's great even though I use Debian now, used to use arch until i had problems with wifi once. Debian's so easy. I used GNOME 3 for a few days. It was pretty. But if you got Debian + awesome + ranger? Then...
One thing I suggest you really not miss out learning are the tiling window managers like AwesomeWM. For a VIM guy like me that package is a dream. Also, don't miss freetype2-infinality. It brings the 'details and customizability' you crave to the 2nd order of magnitude in font rendering.
As a Mac guy now those are the two things I miss about Arch (GNU/Linux in general really, Arch just makes it all simple and easy).
Okay. I strongly recommend awesome as a tiling window manager. It's configurable as hell and pretty light on resources. It can also be controlled entirely by keyboard (or entirely by mouse).
It also provides most of the (important) features of a DE out-of-the-box: a "bar" with menus and a system tray, lots of configurable keyboard shortcuts, and support for floating windows. (note: most tiling WMs provide these things)
Things not provided in a WM that a DE does include:
- GUI "control panels" and configuration editors
- File browser
- probably some other stuff that I've never missed.
If you can manage your system by editing config files rather than using GUIs, you shouldn't miss anything when you switch to a WM rather than a DE.
And yes, any good WM, even tiling ones, have no issue with any kind of graphical application including NetBeans.
Edit: I see you are just now switching to Linux? Well, I know when I switched to Linux it was because I was tired of slow-and-relatively-inefficient Windows. I fell in love with the command line and the huge boosts in efficiency that it granted some tasks. However, I was turned off by the whole Gnome vs. KDE thing -- KDE was buggy and confusing and Gnome had about as many options as a Safeway dishwasher. It wasn't until I switched to a tiling WM that I really felt like I was running a clean, efficient, powerful machine.
> Webdesign sau Programare de jocuri? De ce?
Jocuri. Pentru ca o sa te forteze sa inveti mai multa matematica si o sa fie util mai incolo, chiar daca acum nu pricepi utilitatea. Pentru ca nu-i nimic interesant in webdesign. Pentru ca games are fun. Pentru ca e "mai programare" descat webdesign ( troll bait, stiu).
> Cu ce limbaj de programare imi recomandati sa incep?
Haskell, Lisp. Am pierdut 15 ani pe limbaje imperative, pana cand am gasit lumina limbajelor functionale. O sa fi mai precis si mai succint, de 10 ori sau mai bine decat cu C/Java/etc.
> Se cauta posturile astea in Romania?
Da, cacalau maria ta.
> Sau mai bine zis: se merita sa lucrezi in Romania ca programator?
O sa traiesti decent, dar tot mai bine traiesti afara.
> Windows sau Linux? De ce?
Linux, pentru ca e un sistem conceput de programatori, in mare parte pentru programatori. Pentru ca daca nu ai compilatorul gata instalat cu sistemul, ajunge sa sa bati "apt-get install haskell-compiler" si a terminat povestea. Nu te freci cu google>site>downloads section run, next, finish si alte mizerii. Pentru ca nu-ti pierzi vremea cu antivirusi, pentru ca awesome si vim "e tata lor" si poti lucra doar din tastatura. Pentru ca e the right tool for the job.
> In Romania, care sunt cele mai 'cautate' limbaje de programare?
Ugh ... PhP ?!? Lasa Romania.
> Credeti ca o echipa romaneasca ar putea lucra la un proiect care sa ajunga viral in toata lumea?
Da, de ce nu ?
I highly suggest awesome. Your config is coded in simple lua, the dynamic workspace plugin is beautiful, and the wiki has lots of good tips.
This can definitely be done. Check out the documentation here under the section titled "Layout Modification". There may already be a layout which does what you want, I don't recall off the top of my head. I used a similar layout (left 2/3 was web browser, right 1/3 was two terminals) back when I had awesome installed. I was a newbie back then so the layout likely already existed ;)
I can't say much about Awesome because I don't remember what it was that made me stop trying it out. That was many years ago.
I've been using Xmonad since around 2008. Xmonad's defaults are excellent so you can live with them while learning how to configure it (Haskell). It follows some window manager standards rather strictly, which can lead to problems with focus with some software which violates those standards. Both Awesome and Xmonad are non re-parenting window managers, so you might run into problems with the odd Java or Mono window, but it's rare and there are some easy work-arounds. ( Xmonad and AwesomeWM )
Awesome is a tiling WM that gives you a lot of window-real estate, and can be used entirely without a mouse; I used it for some years on a 12" laptop and it was a very good experience. It works well out of the box, but if you want to you can configure it a lot through Lua. I was running Debian Sid back then, so I'd guess any debian-based distro should have a relatively recent version in its repository.
Try finding awful.rules.rules in your rc.lua and editing the rule for -- All clients will match this rule (or add a rule for gnome-terminal specifically) to add the size_hints_honor = false property:
awful.rules.rules = { -- All clients will match this rule. { rule = { }, properties = { border_width = beautiful.border_width, border_color = beautiful.border_normal, focus = awful.client.focus.filter, keys = clientkeys, size_hints_honor = false, buttons = clientbuttons } },
...
I don't use awesome anymore, but I remember encountering this issue and this might have fixed it for me.
EDIT: See the wiki
>How to remove gaps between windows? In awesome 3.4 you can add size_hints_honor = false to the properties section in your awful.rules.rules table, it will match and apply this rule to all clients. As an alternative (or in older versions) you can do it by adding c.size_hints_honor = false in the manage signal function (or manage hook in older versions). > If you want to know what are size hints it has been debated many times on the mailing list, so you can read the explanation: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01767.html
> this thing is awesome
did you notice that from the luakit site there was a power user window manager referenced as well, using asynchronous xcb instead of xlib, also extensible with lua. It's called <strong>awesome</strong>, I just installed that as well ;)
I've been using WMs for probably 15 years now, and I always end up scrapping gnome/kde for something lighter.
Generally, I tend to drift toward tiling WMs. They're not for everyone, but I really suggest that if you're looking to try and shake up your experience, you give one of them a try for a week or so. After a while, I rarely needed to touch the mouse/trackpad. It was way faster than a normal WM, in terms of actually getting shit done.
Someone else mentioned AwesomeWM; this is the tiling WM I use (http://awesome.naquadah.org/)
Again, it's definitely a steep learning curve especially if you want to customize what virtual screen a particular app spawns on, or hotkeys to start specific apps, but I've never been more pleased to use a computer than I was when this really started to click for me.
I'm not even using Cinnamon anymore but a different window manager altogether. Not because Cinnamon is bad (although it is certainly limited) but because I personally want a lightweight tiling window manager. My choice is awesome but there are many others that are also highly customizable (openbox, i3, etc.). You might wonder why I'm even still using Linux Mint and the reason is quite simply the OS itself, i.e. the package and drivers management, the desktop oriented default configuration, the general ease of installation and the available stable fallback should I ever botch up my desktop's configuration.
PS: If you really want to take your customization efforts to the next level I recommend looking for inspiration on r/unixporn.
So you probably don't want my advice, but if it were me, I'd realize that XFCE is already <em>in</em> Ubuntu, and I'd just install it via apt without having to reinstall Xubuntu. I mean, just because Kubuntu comes with KDE as the default DE doesn't mean you're stuck with it- there's oodles of other DEs and WMs in the repos which you can install and try out.
Plus, they can live alongside your existing KDE install, so you can switch between XFCE and KDE (or whatever the hell you want) easily- all without a reinstall.
This is what I do. I have Ubuntu on my System76 laptop, but I like awesomewm, so that's what I use instead of Unity.
The only downside of doing it my way is you might miss out on Xubuntu customizations that the Xubuntu team makes... though, I'd wager those customizations are somewhere in the Ubuntu repos and can be installed alongside XFCE. In fact, a quick search turned up xubuntu-desktop, which seems to be the Xubuntu customizations. I'd wager installing xfce and xubuntu-desktop will pretty much give you exactly what you're looking for, all without having to re-install.
One of the things I love about Linux in general is that, if you do things right, you never have to re-install. Case in point, I've got a Debian system which I originally installed in 1998 but which I've continuously upgraded and have never had to re-install again. That system is still in use today (it's my central /home directory, network gateway, and file server).
You can use Xinerama an X extension which enables multi-headed X applications and window managers to use two or more physical displays as one large virtual display. This is how to configure it in Awesome
I used guake, too, but switched to scratchpad, which is in my opinion a better solution, because it works without an extra application. In the following link are several solutions, which could help with your problem. http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Drop-down_terminal
lain :: https://github.com/copycat-killer/lain
it picks up where the old vain library left off. awesome, fast, simple, get's the job done :D
gradient :: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Gradient
pretty color fades
naughtly :: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Naughty
dead simple notifications
The awesome wiki has an easy to follow howto for that.
Or you can try with xsettingsd (I like this better because if you want to change the theme for both gtk2 and gtk3 apps you just need change one line in its config and restart it.
I use a mostly default config of awesome; I chose it over other tiling window managers primarily because it had a default config that included things like a system bar. It took me a little while to get used to the tiling paradigm, but now I can't stand floating WMs - I spend forever aligning windows so I can see them all.
As with most tiling users, I use a lot of workspaces - each one has no more than 3 windows on it, generally. I'm also very static in my setup - I can tell you at any given time that my work computer has certain browser and terminal windows open in certain places on certain workspaces, and they have certain tabs open displaying certain things. These two things combined result in me spending a minimal amount of time trying to find windows; I can't tell you how bad I feel for those poor OS X users whose only hope of finding anything is using Expose (and still, it takes them a good 10-15 seconds). FWIW, I use some form of tiling even on my Macbook.
The combination of a tiling wm, vim, and Pentadactyl means that my hands don't really need to leave the keyboard. Good stuff.
Launchers are good. I find that most of the apps I use are either browser-based or cli apps, so my shortcuts for Firefox and Sakura are the most-used. For other things, though, I use yeganesh, a wrapper around dmenu. Gnome-do is a popular fancier alternative.
Awesome reacts to "urgent" signals send by the applications.
But not all applications send those by default - This should help with irssi.
You can customize the colors in your theme.lue file by changing (or adding) the
theme.bg_urgent theme.fg_urgent
(for background and foreground color respectively) values.
You could start here :
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Main_Page This wiki give a lot of information and help for many tweak.
Personnally, I learned by reading other config file and consulting lua and awesome doc :
lua doc : http://www.lua.org/docs.html
awesome doc : http://awesome.naquadah.org/doc/api/
There is no really universal way to achieve this, it depends on your window manager. Here is an Awesome wiki page describing some possible methods: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Autostart
The "Simple way" might be what you are looking for (add awful.util.spawn_with_shell("~/.startup") to ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua)
Long-time Debian user here. I keep a pretty minimal non-desktop setup based on the awesome window manager and the xfce session manager. I spend a good deal of my time in vim.
Regarding the task list:
If you are using Awesome 3.5.1+: Simply add this line to your theme.lua file:
theme.tasklist_disable_icon = true
Also have a look at this: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Remove_icons
Not sure about the menubar though as I don't use it.
Maybe This could help.
It seems that an error occurs when lain tries to open the pipe, you could change the line:
local f = io.popen("amixer get " .. alsabar.channel)
for
local f, error = io.popen("amixer get " .. alsabar.channel .. "2>&1")
and then handle the error as you want... could be using naughty to print it to screen or to a file like /tmp/awesome.error.
Also you could attach a terminal to the awesome using this link to see the stderr of awesome that should contain a sign of what the hell is happening...
More than a solution this just a better way of debugging.
edit: grammar
Awesome WM does it better. It's very minimalistic (so it doesn't consume CPU/GPU computational power), it allows to switch to another workspace from ANY game that is in fullscreen mode.
Stylish, fast and bug-proof. For full and complex customization, it requires some programming skills though, because Awesome uses Lua for that. Enjoy!
--{{---| Signals |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- client.add_signal("manage", function (c, startup) -- Add a titlebar -- awful.titlebar.add(c, { modkey = modkey }) c:add_signal("mouse::enter", function(c) if awful.layout.get(c.screen) ~= awful.layout.suit.magnifier and awful.client.focus.filter(c) then client.focus = c end end) if not startup then if not c.size_hints.user_position and not c.size_hints.program_position then awful.placement.no_overlap(c) awful.placement.no_offscreen(c) end end end) client.add_signal("focus", function(c) c.border_color = beautiful.border_focus end) client.add_signal("unfocus", function(c) c.border_color = beautiful.border_normal end)
It seems like your Signals are not properly ported to Awesome 3.5: It should be client.connect_signal and not add_signal.
For reference, this is how the Signal section of the default config looks like: pastebin
The important part:
if not c.size_hints.user_position and not c.size_hints.program_position then
awful.placement.no_overlap(c)
awful.placement.no_offscreen(c)
end
Have a look at the Awesome API if you want to know what other placement options (like under_mouse or centered) are available.
EDIT: Tons of stuff changed. Let's call all previous versions a WIP. xD
If you like tiling WMs, I switched last week from Awesome WM to bspwm. Bspwm is really simple, does its job and stays out of the way. It comes without menu, just like Openbox, but there are heaps of menus around. I just built mine with python and bar[-aint-recursive].
You can create a menu like this:
mymainmenu = awful.menu({ items = menu_items, width = 150})
It might be possible to do this for each submenu, I haven't tested. Here are the options you can add: awful.menu.html#new
For Debian users, you can put following script under ~/.menu-methods then run update-menus to generate Debian menus, although you should be able to generate them already. Try running update-menus before running this script. Don't forget to restart Awesome.
#!/usr/bin/install-menu # this file has to be executable # put under ~/.menu-methods # will run by update-menus # default generate ~/.config/awesome/menu.lua # you need to require("menu") to use menu.debian_menu
compat="menu-1"
!include menu.h
compat="menu-2" outputencoding= "UTF-8";
function q($s) = "\"" esc($s,"\\"") "\""; function s($s) = replacewith(replacewith($s,"/",""), " ", ""); function findicon($filename)= ifelsefile($filename, q($filename), iffile("/usr/share/pixmaps/" $filename, q("/usr/share/pixmaps/" $filename))); function x11menu()= "\t{"q(title())","q($command) ifnempty($icon, ","findicon($icon))"},\n"; function textmenu()= "\t{"q(title())", \"x-terminal-emulator -e \".."q($command) ifnempty($icon, ","findicon($icon))"},\n";
supported; x11= x11menu(); text= textmenu(); endsupported;
startmenu= s($section)" = {\n"; endmenu= "}\n"; submenutitle= "\t{"q(title())","s($section)"},\n"; genmenu= "menu.lua"; rootsection= "debian_menu"; userprefix= "/.config/awesome/"; preoutput= "-- automatically generated file. Do not edit (see /usr/share/doc/menu/html)\n\nmodule(\"menu\")\n\n";
I don't have my config here, but don't forget to checkout the list of configs on the Wiki: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/User_Configuration_Files
On my config, I've added 10 more tags that are activated with the F1-10 keys, and use Eminent to hide the tags without windows.
I don't use many widgets, but I do have a few custom actions for the text box:
- Mod4+d lets me input a word and have the definition shown in a popup
- Mod4+c lets me use the text box as an RPN calculator
- Mod4+g is my password generator: it takes a domain and creates a password from it and a fixed seed. No need for password managers!
I've also configured Awesome to call various mpc and amixer commands when I press my multimedia keys.
If anyone wants the code for any of this, just ask!
It is either Awesome or DWM. There are directions for making widgets over at awesome.naquadah.org.
This page is also a good resource. Has screenshots and the accompanying config files.
Until recently, I was using an iBook G4 I bought on 2005 (1GB of RAM, you got me there!) and a Fujitsu Siemens pentium 3 laptop with a motherboard limit of 256 MB of RAM. The owner of this second laptop gave it to me because of the RAM issue and because the battery was shot. Debian, with awesome and google Chrome made it decent to surf the web, but I had to stay away from Flash-based sites.
Four months ago I decided to invest in a x201 thinkpad laptop and I regret to say that my old machines are going to collect a lot of dust. Anyways, I believe that, five years from now, I will be using that same computer at home. If that laptop holds up (hope Lenovos compare to IBMs), reddit is still alive, you stick to your username and we both are still alive, I'll tell you how it went (I just marked the date on my google calendar).
How does it compare with awesome? Having played with awesome for a bit I think having a scripting language at the core is immensely helpful, I like the look of Lua, and the window manager looks well supported.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304133257/http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/KDE_and_awesome - This works for me, took me sometime to find it since it's not googable but a guy in IRC mentioned it a week ago and it has been working for me. Most places only mention the KDEWM env var but it crashed on start until I put Hide into .desktop files to prevent them from starting.
You could register the widget with Vicious, then use Vicious' timers to update it. You can find information and examples here: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Vicious
If you don't want to use Vicious, you can probably adapt code from an existing widget that depends on timers to update their display, like Lain's weather widget. https://github.com/copycat-killer/lain/blob/master/widgets/weather.lua
I struggled to make guake, yakuake, tilde, and several other drop-down terminals work in awesome and never figured out how to work around this problem. In the end, I used scratchdrop. Only downside compared to the others is that each monitor gets its own distinct terminal, rather than sharing a single dropdown amongst them.
The upside is that it's faster and more awesome-y.
From what you wrote I'm wondering if you created an rc.lua?
I order to use a custom theme (or in fact any custom settings at all) you need to copy the global rc.lua
cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua
and then edit your local version. To change the theme you can follow this section from the wiki.
Awesome will always look for a local config first and if it can't find one or if it causes an error on load it'll fall back to the global one. You should therefore never edit the global one.
> It has multitasking, split view
Split View is limited to two applications, and only vertical split. What I personally would want in a big screen tablet is a tiled window manager like awesome.
That's what I, quite naturally did. The Wiki isn't so "beginner friendly". It assumes you know how "Awesome" handles tags and themes. It is very informative though and I'm sure that it would be helpful when I'll eventually get there. I tried to read the so called "My first Awesome" which seems to be outdated, and what I've learned from it does not apply to any of the existing configuration files I tried to download and reverse engineer, most likely due to the extensive use of libraries.
I could read the documentation, though I would rather having a more detailed guide with a practical approach, so that I would be able to experience the configuration and use the documentation as further reading when I want to implement a specific thing.
The same way that reading the English-French dictionary wouldn't be an efficient way to learn French, reading about the contents of the different modules without knowing the basics would require a massive effort before I would be able to configure the window manager the way I want.
As for now, I am not sure I have fully understood the concept of themes and the interaction between them and the configuration itself. Moreover, I'm not sure about the use of each one of the libraries with the annoying names. I ended up breaking my configuration and my system refuses to load.
> No mouse needed: everything can be performed with keyboard;
I've never gotten it to cooperate with my environment, but I think it does what you're looking for. Let me know how it goes if you try it!
From what I can tell you're looking for something similar to this awesomewm script. I'm looking for a similar kwin script but had no luck. So the best solution would be to make something similar for kwin.
EDIT: I've found a good tutorial here. The gist of it is you make a short shell script called run-or-raise and bind a global shortcut of Super+number to it. You still have to set Super+Shift+number separately, but that's not too hard.
Simplest no scripting required way (that I can think of) is to use window matching. Right click on a window's title bar, go to more actions and choose "Special Application Settings". In the "Arrangement & Access" tab you will find the Shortcut option, which you can Set to apply initially. Set that to Super+Number. This will let you switch to an already running application.
To create a new instance of an application you can create a new keybinding for each in the Custom Shortcuts dialogue. To find it just write Custom Shortcuts into krunner.
Obviously you're not limited to number keys here. You could have Super+f focus firefox, which is a tad easier to remember.
Hope this helps and if anyone can point me to a quick and readable kwin scripting tutorial I'd be grateful ;)
> Logged off, logged back on, it worked.
You can restart awesome on the fly.
Win+Ctrl+R should be the default keybinding -
Very useful when you are messing around with your confg and theme.
> I need to learn this config thing.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Main_Page
You'll find some pointers there, but it also contains loads of outdated stuff.
Also check out awesome-copycats and lain:
https://github.com/copycat-killer/awesome-copycats
It's a collection of premade configs (copycats), useful widgets and advanced layouts (lain).
Even if you don't like the configs, you can have a look at the files to see what's possible and how it works.
By default there is no way you can map the space key twice. Awesome stores your rc.lua keybindings in a table, so they're a hash, not a function. It matches simultaneous keypresses to it's hash table, and when they match, it executes the function assigned.
There is a way however in Awesome to trap keypresses. I've never tried it, and I can't say if there would be a performance penalty doing it, but if you want to experiment, you can find info on it here, with examples:
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Modal_Keybindings http://awesome.naquadah.org/doc/api/modules/keygrabber.html
I have used Xserver XSDL in combination with GNURoot (no actual root required) to set up a Debian-based distro. With the Awesome window manager it's actually quite usable with an external keyboard.
Your problem at first glance appears to be here:
> [ 1050.972] Number of created screens does not match number of detected devices.
Since there is only one device in 20-nvidia.conf, this might be a part of the problem.
This page might also provide some valuable insight.
launching an app to a certain tag (desktop) is as simple as adding a rule for it. http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Understanding_Rules
but this cannot be done using an xinit script. you need to put it at the bottom of your main rc.lua, something like:
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("icedove")
if you have an icedove rule in place (say, send it to tag 2) this will happen since awesome is already loaded. hope that helps!
I dont what other distro to suggest because for me its all about trying them out to see what you like best. Maybe if you're used to Ubuntu, Debian might be a good option? Or that might be to similar. Maybe you could move to Arch for the bare-bones system to customise yourself.
Although if you're starting from scratch, maybe try using a tiling window manager this time, i3, Awesome and qtile are examples of these. I personally find that a tiling WM works great because you can have an easy, clean code/browser/console split for testing things instad of managing minimising, maximising and moving around floating windows yourself.
I like awesome a lot! I use it on a laptop and desktop with 2 monitors and it works great. Out of the box is ready, you'll probably want to tweak some hotkeys though. Lua is pretty easy to play with. awesome WM
Bleh, I could never get used to i3. I've heard xmonad is good, but never used it. subtle has good composting support, qtile is good for people not familiar with linux yet, and as far as I'm concerned everything else is pretty much shit.
Gnome/unity is OK, xfce/kde just get progressively worse. I hate having to organize my windows myself, it just takes way too much time. On my server computers my .xinitrc is just "metacity&gnome-terminal;wait", and that's everything I need, but still no tiling.
In case you haven't heard of it I'm using awesome, which in my opinion is just the best one out there. Configuration is a pain, but lucky for you it has 99% of the features you want with only configuring it to start using the "spiral" type. Super-Enter opens x-terminal-emulator, and Super+R opens a discreet run prompt at the top of the screen. All I have to do is S-R + "chrome" and hit enter to be browsing my email, which is way faster than any other window manager I've ever used. It's highly usable as well. There are 9 (by default, you can have more) "tags" at the top of the screen. Each window ("client") can have one or more tags. There are key combinations to send a window to a tag, toggle weather the window is attached to a tag, and view multiple tags at once, but the great thing is that you will probably never ever need any of those. Just a S-2 and a S-<enter> and you're doing something completely different.
Basically I hate having to use my mouse. Ever. It just slows down the workflow. Awesome WM is probably the best thing to come into my life, and I love to brag about it.
tl;dr don't actually read all that, it's just me ranting. I like the awesome wm
This might be helpful:
>For window properties that are strings, the property values you supply to rule et al are compared to the window properties using the Lua string.match() function, which performs sub-string and pattern matching. Thus, a rule of the form { class = "x" } would match all windows where the character "x" appeared anywhere in the window's class property.
Did you try it without any wildcards?
Yes it's the pink box, it's something called theme.border_focus in my theme file. I think that you could look at Beautiful if it's not what you are currently using.
I know it isn't what you asked for, but I'd have a look at i3 and awesome which are both tiling window managers.
I've only tried i3 for a few minutes, but it felt like a nice acquaintance. It seems to break with some of the more standard ideas among tiling window managers -- at least having three different layout easily available through keyboard shortcuts was really nice and something I hadn't considered. The suckless tools (of which i3 is part) are always great.
In the last few years I've used awesome and XMonad. The former is configured in Lua while the latter is configured in Haskell, which may be a bit tough to get into.
Hmm. Everything looks right. I think you should try starting redshift at boot via your rc.lua. (similar to the way you would start a compositor, or something of that nature)
Should be doable by adding:
os.execute("command to start redshift")
This page will have have a lot of relevant information regarding the subject. I'm pretty sure that's the issue. Everything checks out, but I don't think you're starting it correctly.
Looks like he's using Awesome, which is a window manager for X. I'd say it's a linux dist or a flavour of BSD. The use of Korn shell suggests the latter. OpenBSD would fit with Assange's philosophic leanings and uses ksh as its default shell. The main window looks like it has a terminal multiplexer running in it, but you can't really do the darker parts in a terminal, so I'm guessing it's fake (movie magic).
Using crappy PC for gmail and reddit? Download and install ubuntu minimal cd and install Awesome Window Manager (or any tiling window manager) set the layout(Firefox or Chromium) to fullscreen as a default.
Not everyone has a taskbar, or a even a tall taskbar on there system. For example I run Awesome WM and all I have is a small ~16px high bar at the bottom of my screen that displays track information for the currently playing song and a few other things of interest. So in cases like mine the uneven bars would get annoying.
Awesome wm. http://awesome.naquadah.org
It is really good if you are into lightweight tiling wms.
Font is Droid Sans 7(I think, not near my laptop right now) for the top bar, at 96 dpi with anti-aliasing on and full hinting. I'm gonna try that infinality thing on of these days - it does wonders for my arch installation (this is Ubuntu)
you can use awesome window manager, so you can place any windows in any layout you need: * http://awesome.naquadah.org/ (awesome wm) * https://dl.dropbox.com/u/185133/groundhog_day.jpg (my desktop)
You probably should do sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop, then logout and select XFCE as your DE (desktop environment).
edit: I have used those minimalistic environments (like fluxbox, openbox), other lightweight alternatives like icewm and enlightment, and more popular choices like gnome, KDE and XFCE. Right now I am using a really minimal, tiling WM called xmonad. There are other tiling WMs like awesome.
The thing about XMonad is that its configuration file is written in Haskell, so you need a minimum of proficiency in Haskell in order to configure it (it's a relationship similar to Emacs and Emacs Lisp), and on top of that the way it works is really alien, so it's probably not for the casual user.
Enable window title bars, and floating windows by default. Then move the top bar to the bottom and configure it to display open windows as only icons.
EDIT: start here http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Awesome_3_configuration
I was running awesome at one point, but I ended up coming back to XFCE because I wanted a more featured desktop environment (edit: and compiz)
The one thing I really liked from awesome and other related WM's that I wish I had in XFCE was the ability to easily write custom widgets (awesome used lua). From what I could tell, even in XFCE you have to write your widgets in C, or use gnome widgets (also written in C). There aren't any good bindings to a scripting language that I can easily write widgets.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Widgets_in_awesome
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Vicious
Haha, oops. :p I find it rather functional at least. Not having to use the mouse is great IMO.
The awesome wiki along with man pages should be enough to get you started. It's rather important to read up quite a bit on how it works, since it's quite a bit different to "usual" floating window managers (assuming you haven't previously tried another tiling WM).
Agreed: vim + latex-suite is the only civilized way to go about it. The learning curve can be a little steep, but you'll soon get back what effort you put in. (I find myself trying to use vim shortcuts while typing this comment, they're so useful.)
And if you're running some flavor of *nix let me take a moment to evangelize for my new favorite window manager, awesome wm. It's a tiling window manager, which essentially means it places your windows for you, and you rearrange/open/close them with keyboard shortcuts - no mouse required! It's very productive if you've got, say, a pdf of a textbook, a pdf of class notes, a web browser and vim all open while writing some tex, and you need to flip back and forth between them - as I often do.
Looks like any Linux distro with Gnome and Awesome Window Manager on top of it. Could also be Gnome + xmonad perhaps as well. It most definately is running emacs.
It's Arch running Awesome, a tiling window manager.
What do you want me to explain about the dirty screenshot?
Thanks!
FWIW, I use awesomeWM, a tiling-capable framework window manager. It allows me to lay out my windows and workspaces based on programmatic triggers and default configurations, so I don't have to spend any time at all thinking about my windows (beyond the time spent creating my initial configuration).
Technically if you click the 'a' in one of the corners you get the application menu. However, awesome isn't really meant to be like that, and you'll find that relying on menus in awesome doesn't work well. Running a command with mod4+r supports tab completion, so if you have chrome installed you can type goog-TAB and it should auto-complete to google-chrome. It's just as if you were in a shell typing the program's name.
OH, one last key one -- by default, mod4-enter opens up a shell of your choice. Pretty critical :)
You can get help by running 'man awesome' in a shell, going to the main wiki: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Main_Page or the Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome
There is also this, but I think it's meant to be more of a theme/configuration tutorial than a getting started one: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/My_first_awesome
It's meant to be people more comfortable using shells a lot (of which I am one). Good luck!
I see. I also am a big fan of Emacs and also work a lot with computing sutff (with Mathematica... I know, I know). I spend 80% of my time in Emacs.
Have you tried other window managers? I use awesome and it's, well, awesome.
Show me your .emacs and I'll tell you who you are.
Yeah, on my primary desktop, albeit a 10.04 install. (Running it on Debian on my laptop, same config.)
If you're just looking to try the tiling WM thing (and haven't), you might want to give awesome a look. There's a certain amount of configuration overhead with xmonad.
Obligatory Awesome WM recommendation. Highly customisable. By itself it's by no means a full DE, but like I said it's very customisable so if you're willing to put in a bit of work you can make it as featureful as you like.
You are correct. The window manager is Awesome. The file manager looks like Thunar, the XFCE file manager with a white GTK theme and simple icon theme. Given that it appears to be running on a laptop and that most of the commonly used Awesome WM battery monitors use /sys and other Linux only features a naive guess would be that it is a Linux distribution. It could however be a BSD or other UNIX.
If you use the keyboard that much and you want to keep some windows from overlapping (I guess that's why you don't want raise on click), have you considered trying a tiling window manager (e.g. awesome)?
At first it was a bit weird for me to get used to it, but once I did I really don't want to go back. You'll learn to use virtual desktops, it makes window switching so fast and organized.
You're in luck; things like this are the reason the project exists.
Awesome's config file is, as you've most likely noticed, in Lua. Anything you can do with Lua you can do with Awesome.
I've never had to do something like this myself, but someone in their irc channel probably has.
I use a snippet from the now defunct awesome-wiki (http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Autostart#PID_way) in rc.lua:
function run_once(prg,arg_string,pname,screen) if not prg then do return nil end end if not pname then pname = prg end if not arg_string then awful.util.spawn_with_shell("pgrep -f -u $USER -x '" .. pname .. "' || (" .. prg .. ")",screen) else awful.util.spawn_with_shell("pgrep -f -u $USER -x '" .. pname .. "' || (" .. prg .. " " .. arg_string .. ")",screen) end end
And can use it to start applications once:
run_once("nm-applet")
If you guys were running the drop-down terminal from http://web.archive.org/web/20160224051838/http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Drop-down_terminal
I've updated the script to work against latest awesome: https://gist.github.com/vinipsmaker/940167389182e0fbcf64e02dd79e32c7/revisions
~~Only thing is that I don't know how to hide title bar of the new window (and this title bar looks like a new thing from awesome 4.0)~~.
Quoted from the archlinux wiki page on awesome window manager:
> You can set up Gnome to use awesomeawesomewm as the visual interface, but have GNOME work in the background. See awesome wikiawesome wiki for details.
Regardless of that, you'll might find awesome better at configuration than I3 because it is pure lua scripts.
Here is an image I found after googling 'awesome wm with gnome' to get you an idea of how it will might look like: awesome wm with Gnome from askubuntu.com
Like some other people have suggested, you might want to look into a tiling window manager. The one I use is called awesome. If you open up a terminal window, it will immediately be full screen. Now you can open more terminals (or divide and conquer a single window with tmux!), either on the same desktop or on separate ones.
With a WM you'll still have access to useful GUI programs (if you like vim, you should try out qutebrowser!) without the clutter of a full DE.
Pretty much anything you'd want to do can be done with keyboard shortcuts, so, just like in a pure CLI, no need to reach for the mouse.
Alright I installed it and tried tweaking it a bit by changing Xresources to whats listed here: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Urxvt and now it won't start... If I try to start it using xfce's "Terminal emulator" launcher thing it says input/output error...
Yep - I just remembered to check now and the window size is fixed for me. In case you were looking for an alternative, Cinnamon does this easily, and you can set it up so that the "snapped" window will not be covered by any maximized window, the maximized window will "maximize" between the other edge and your snapped window, essentially giving you very nice two-window tilling at whatever geometry you want (just resize the snapped window as desired). I prefer a true tiling window manager, so I'm running awesome right now, but I dabble with cinnamon now and then, and I keep Gnome installed to check it out once in a while. Would be cool to see those changes /u/SomeGenericUsername linked to!
Cinnamon is a DE, not a distro. But yes, any linux distro will be able to dual-boot or be installed to a USB.
If you are seriously only running IDLE and want something very small and lightweight, you don't even need a DE, just a window manager like awesome. A DE contains a window manager and a host of other programs (like a taskbar, etc). If you are only running one program, you might not need all of the other features.
The reason that you've received many different responses is because there are many, many choices to choose from so it's difficult to make specific recommendation without knowing your preferences.
I don't game so it's never been an issue for me.
I'm finding that about Awesome WM and XFCE. I actually toggle between a tiling WM and one with a 'desktop'. Any time I've googled for something someone had a short script to do it. Such as "I think that would be a great spot for the weather" sure enough, someone made it
> I'm not sure how those features are called, but in Mint Cinnamon they're called Scale and Expo respectively.
For Expo like functionality, you can use awesome-wm with revelation plugin
I've never tried it, but I'm pretty sure that you can swap out different window managers inside the KDE DE. For example, running i3wm inside KDE might suit you?
Here's a howto for KDE and awesome (via i3wm and kde together - i3 FAQ
He could be using Linux and a WindowManager. AwesomeWM for example offers programmable window tiling.
2:10 - 2:50 shows a lot of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/EapkcJ59xgA?t=133
Awesome WM was easiest for me to get along.
For me it's the best one for multi-monitor setup: with some tweaks I can now maximize windows over 1/2/3 monitors using kb shortcuts.
Also it already have basic configuration when you install it (with basic menu, etc.). It light on dependencies and in size, so installing or uninstalling (if you wont get hooked) wont be any hassle.
Awesome WM wiki
What version of awesome are you using? See my reply above.
Here you can find further information on how to set up your wallpaper with the gears.wallpaper module. It supports tiling as well.
Awesome should ship with awsetbg, which is used to set the background.
The command
awsetbg -t /path/to/wallpaper.file
should set a tiled wallpaper.
Stick that in your theme.lua file; look for the line
theme.wallpaper_cmd
If that fails, try feh. The command
$ feh --bg-tile /path/to/image.file
should also tile a wallpaper.
If you're missing a theme.lua file, copy it from
>A default theme file is provided and is located at /usr/local/share/awesome/themes/default/theme.lua or /usr/share/awesome/themes/default/theme.lua, depending on your distro.
Make sure you have the lines
beautiful = require('beautiful') beautiful.init("path_to_theme_file")
somewhere in your rc.lua.
That should do it.
>How do you move it?
awful.key({ modkey, }, "o", awful.client.movetoscreen ), awful.key({ modkey, }, "F1", function(c) awful.client.movetoscreen(c,1) end), awful.key({ modkey, }, "F2", function(c) awful.client.movetoscreen(c,2) end), awful.key({ modkey, }, "F3", function(c) awful.client.movetoscreen(c,3) end),
OR
awful.button({ modkey }, 1, awful.mouse.client.move),
(Just because I wanted to be sure it was consistent over all methods I knew.
>Which version of awesome are you using?
Installed Packages Name : awesome Arch : x86_64 Version : 3.5.6 Release : 1.fc21 Size : 1.4 M Repo : installed From repo : updates Summary : Highly configurable, framework window manager for X. Fast, light and extensible URL : http://awesome.naquadah.org License : GPLv2+ and BSD Description : Awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window : manager for X. It is very fast, light and extensible. : : It is primary targeted at power users, developers and any people : dealing with every day computing tasks and want to have fine-grained : control on its graphical environment.
>Can you try Git master?
I could, but I try to stick with the Repos where possible. This would be a last resort grade option for me because I can't afford down time on this machine. I may set up a VM to test the Master Branch on it.
>Multi-monitor support has bugs, and some programs behave weird. It would be also good to report/answer this via the Github issue tracker.
If I fail to get anywhere with Git/Master (they haven't fixed it in a downstream version of mine) then I will.
Check this out:
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/FAQ#How_to_start_clients_on_specific_tags_and_others_as_floating.3F
Something like this:
{ rule = { class = "ue4" }, properties = {floating = true} }
Where ue4 is whatever the program is actually called
You'll probably need to reload awesome using Mod + Ctrl + r after modifying the config file