Getting Started With Awesome Window Manager

on a recent video of mine I suggested that you guys if you've never installed a window manager before especially a tiling window manager you should give it a try because it's easy it won't hurt your existing system in any way and the one I suggested you guys start with was the awesome window manager why did I suggest awesome is because you know these tiling window managers have varying degrees of complexity especially in the beginning awesome comes with a nice desktop if you will out of the box it has a panel with some widgets already installed it has a menu system and it has sensible keyboard defaults where on the other end of the spectrum you have things like DWM and especially X Mon ed when you log into X mode after installing it it's just a black screen and if you don't know how to bring up a terminal at that point you really can't do anything with X Monet we're awesome like I said you know you can install sudo apt install awesome login to awesome and can actually do work right away and awesome so some of you guys took me up on the offer and you guys have installed awesome but now you're wondering ok I've installed it what do i do how do I can figure it you know what do I need to do well let me show you the first thing you want to do is of course install awesome if you haven't already installed it so I'm gonna pull up a VM this is a boon to 2004 but again you can install this on anything I just assumed most people are probably running a debian or an a boon tube based system anyway so I'm gonna use a boon - for this example and I'm logged in in a bun - ctrl alt T brings up a terminal so we need to bring up a terminal here let me zoom in so you guys can see this but you need to run this command sudo apt install awesome hit enter give it your root password and it's gonna install a few packages awesome does have some dependencies not many awesome is configured in the Lua programming language so if you don't have Lua on the system it might may want to install that it should just take a second though to install alright and the installation has completed and now what you need to do is close that terminal and let's log out so logout of genome or if you were using plasma or xfce logout of your desktop environment go back to your login manager and in your login manager somewhere you should see some kind of cog or setting or hamburger menu whatever it is and it lists all your current sessions that are available now you should in addition to genome or plasma or whatever you should have a session called awesome let's login to awesome this is awesome out-of-the-box it has a panel at the top and it gives you a menu system you have this funny-looking AIDS the awesome logo here if you click on it you have a menu you could use this menu most people that use telling window managers don't use this kind of menu system many people just delete this from the panel but it's there if you want it also you can right-click on the desktop the same way you right-click and get the menu and open box or some cases xfce it's actually the same menu as this button both of them bring up the same menu your layouts if you click this icon here right now we are in the floating layout see if you hover over it it gives you the hint that you're in the floating layout that's the tiled layout tile lift top bottom tile top the font it's kind of small I apologize fair Vee fair h spiraled wendell max full screen magnifier there's a whole bunch of layouts here by default and the reason I suggest awesome for a first tiling window manager is the fact that they have so much stuff in the config they include like a dozen different layouts then it's easy for you to get into that config and comment out all the layouts you're not gonna use you're not gonna use most of those layouts but it's cool they include all of them by default for the new user because you can actually see what the layouts are what you like what you don't like super enter brings up a terminal so you need to know that key binding that's that's very important I believe super shift see closes the terminal yes so super enter to open a terminal super shift see closes the window with focus it doesn't necessarily have to be a terminal super or get you a run prompt and you see in the panel it's very small text I apologize but you now have a run prompt it says run : and then you have a prompt you can start typing something so if I wanted to launch my browser or file manager or whatever it is the file manager on Ubuntu is Nautilus that's the only one available I probably shouldn't launch that because it's gonna try to do some weird stuff to the desktop I think well let's try it let me launch Nautilus no it doesn't and older versions of Nautilus it used to take over your desktop and draw a wallpaper over the screen you really didn't want to use Nautilus anaise minimal window manager like all these tiling window managers it actually caused problems but it looks like it's fine here now the first thing we want to do is we want to find the config file so the awesome config file should be in a hidden folder in your home directory dot config the dot config folder is really where every program should put their config files their user config files and in this folder you should have a folder called awesome we do not we could create one and you know what that's what I'll do right now just right-click I'm gonna say create new folder and we'll call it awesome if I can type and in this folder there needs to be a document called RC Lua we don't have one obviously we could create one and start writing it from scratch but really what we need to do is copy over a default or C dot Lua because there is a default on the system it's the one that awesome is using right now it's just not in our home users dot config slash awesome directory it's somewhere probably in the root filesystem so let's find it it's a called RC Lua so it's super enter to bring up a terminal but I want to run this command so I want you to search in the root filesystem for a file or directory called RC Lua and it's gonna complain about not having root permissions especially to search in the root directory so sudo find root - named RC Lua give it the root password and there you go it's in / Etsy / x DJ / awesome RC dot copy that so to copy that we want to see B for copy space the path to that file space and then the tilde character slash for our home directory the tilde is alias for our home directory dot config slash awesome and we're just going to copy that over hit enter now let me see D into dot config and do an LS CD into awesome doing LS and there you go we have a our C Lua file now in that directory I'm gonna close the terminal again because this is geared toward new to tiling window manager users maybe even new to Linux users I know the terminal can be kind of scary and we did need the terminal to find that file that's why I pulled it up but most of this can be done in your graphical file manager and with graphical text editors so that's what I'm gonna use today so let's open up our file manager again remember super are gets our run prompt C run at the top we have a prompt just start typing the name of a program in my case because this was a boon to I know the file manager that is installed by default is Nautilus so I type Nautilus hit enter and then I get our file manager here and then we need to go back in there that dot config folder there is awesome and there is our C dot Laura if I right-click on it let's see what applications we can open it with just the text editor which is G edit the default text editor in Ubuntu so let's open it in G edit and this is our config file now we can start changing things so I don't want to get into a programming tutorial or a Lua tutorial I'm not a programmer and a little bit of programming I dunno I don't know really much about Lilith but you don't really need to know these programming languages to heck on these window managers because they're pretty self-explanatory especially when the developers leave you comments in the files so in lua the comments are the lines that begin with two dashes these are not code these are just comments standard awesome library it's telling you what these are so all this stuff here that says local and then a name after it that is just pulling in some Lua libraries you import all these Lua libraries so later you can use all these various functions going further down the config you see terminal equals X terminal emulator now you could set that to anything the X terminal emulator is your default terminal on your system if you have one set but you could change that you are X V T or X term or st or termite or alacrity or whatever it is you want to use and I would probably just set that to alacrity in my case but you guys set it to whatever you want to set it to you can also set a default editor so if you want to edit in vim or Emacs or Genie or G editor or sublime or whatever it is you want to use you know set a default editor on that line right there the mod key is the super key but it doesn't have to be you can set the mod key instead of mod 4 which is super you can set it to mod 1 which is the Alt key I think most users probably would prefer the super key so I will leave that the first thing you want to do though with any window manager is set some things to auto start meaning when you first log into awesome it runs these commands and the commands you wanted to run you wanted to launch a compositor you know so you can have transparency and drop shadow in you know nice graphical effects without all the screen tearing you also want it to auto-launch some kind of wallpaper sitter so it actually draws a wallpaper on the screen so you didn't for sure what those two things to auto start you may want some systrace stuff to auto start maybe a network manager or volume control or you know whatever it is you're gonna have a few things that you want to always start as soon as you log into your window manager how do you do that in awesome well what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna scroll all the way to the bottom of the config it's just get completely out of the way here I'm gonna make some space here at the end of the config and let's actually type something so I do apologize if you're not great at typing but this is not complicated here let's make a comment it's just so if we ever come back to this config we know exactly what we did so gonna do two dashes to leave a comment and I'm gonna write Auto Start applications and hit enter and then the command you want to write to auto start something is awful got spawn dot with underscore shell you see that awful dot spawn dot with underscore shell and then you need parentheses now something needs to go in the parentheses what needs to go into parentheses whatever it is that you want to auto start now you may want three or four different programs to auto start so what I would do is I would just ctrl C here in G edit just to copy that and you know paste a few different lines with that and then you just need to add the Auto Start programs you want to add they need to be in quotes single quotes or double quotes I'm gonna use double quotes here so inside these double quotes I know we're gonna want Compton for a compositor I also know we're gonna want nitrogen to set our wallpaper by the way neither Compton or nitrogen is probably installed we need to run nitrogen space dash dash restore that draws our wallpaper and if you had anything else that you wanted to automatically launch such as network manager or volume control or whatever it is like I said you could just keep adding lines but I'm just gonna go with those two for now I'm gonna save and if we restarted awesome hopefully Compton and nitrogen would launch but of course they're not gonna do anything until we install them so super enter to bring up a terminal what you guys want to do is sudo apt install you need to install Compton and you need to install nitrogen hit enter give it your root password these are very small programs as well should just take a second to install alright it finished installing so let me close this super shift see to kill the window with focus and then super are to get our run prompt and I want to actually run nitrogen before we do anything else because you actually have to run nitrogen before you can do the nitrogen dash dash restore because what this does it restores the last wallpaper you set with nitrogen but until you actually use nitrogen at least one time there's nothing to do so when you launch nitrogen go into preferences we need to add a directory of a directory where it looks for wallpapers now because this is a VM I don't have my wallpaper directory or anything installed by default but on most Linux systems you can find wallpaper in the root directory so if I go to file system here you'll find wallpapers usually in user share backgrounds and this is where you find the default wallpaper pack here and a boon to you'll also find sometimes they'll have sub directories and backgrounds they'll have / monta for a monta wallpaper pack or / getting on for Agra gnome wallpaper pack but we're just good with user shared backgrounds I'm gonna hit select and it won't hit okay and now all the wallpapers I can choose are available here and I'm just gonna choose one of the wallpapers here I'm going to choose that one with the boat it looks very nice hit apply and it just set my wallpaper nitrogen good so now that we've saved our our Salewa file and it will now auto start both Compton and nitrogen space - - restore let's see this in action I'm gonna actually close all of this and I'm gonna log out I'm gonna quit awesome I'm not sure what the key binding is by the thought I can guess but you guys what you can always do remember we do actually have a menu now so the great thing about this menu is if you don't know the key bindings you know you have this menu something else I haven't told you guys about is you can actually quickly find all the key bindings in your awesome config file with super s so if you hit super s it brings up this cheat sheet it has all the key bindings that you've placed in your RC lua and what they do how cool is that so - reload awesome I can see control super R reloads awesome so well since I took the trouble to actually find that control super R we just relaunched awesome and I noticed the font got a bigger here in the penile let me restart that again control super or yeah okay I guess that's the way it is but it is working you see we have wallpaper and I'm assuming if I get super inter Compton is working we would have transparency if we wanted to enable transparency now where before without a compositor you couldn't have transparency let's see if this terminal gives us the option to do some transparent backgrounds so the colors use transparency use transparent background not exactly sure why I can't choose use transparent background tick that off tick that off there we go we can set some transparency and you can see that our compositor is working because we have transparency close that terminal I notice we need to play with nitrogen a little bit so let me super are and run nitrogen again I don't like having to type the full name nitrogen whatever built in run prompt they have here and awesome I actually want to install it much better when we should probably install daemon you but anyway the scaling right here it says automatic we probably want that skilled it apply and now yeah we get the full screen wallpaper here I'm gonna super enter so to make your lives a lot easier you're not gonna like that run prompt I can tell you I would install daemon you personally if you prefer something else like Rafi or Albert or you know some other run prompt you're free to install them but just for purposes of this video and I know it's a small program let's sudo apt install D menu I know I'm gonna want that I'm probably not gonna want to keep using Nautilus as my file manager I'll install PC man fum it's like fast I'm not gonna keep wanting to use this terminal either and it's probably the genome terminal I'm sure it's alright but just for purposes of this video let's just go with termite you know it's a fine terminal and let's install these programs there is no eka CH for D menu it says selecting suppli stools instead okay that is interesting let's go with suppli s-- - tools unable to locate termites so we can't find termite in the Ubuntu hurry pose either well that's fine because I could use any terminal I'll just stick with the genome terminal for now I could install st but i'd have to patch st to make it work alright so let's install the menu and pc man mmm so to run d menu from the terminal here type d menu underscore run hit enter yes and this is a much better run prompt because i don't have to type the full path to nitrogen or the pool the full file name i can just start typing and when it gets to what thinks I'm searching for all I had to do was type NIT I could hit in her and open nitrogen where the built-in run prompt here and awesome I actually have to type the full path that kind of sucks so I want to change super R instead of giving me that built in run prompt I wanted to give me demon you how do you do that well we need to open up our file manager so super R and this time we will have to type PC man mmm the full name until we get this fixed and this is PC man mmm instead of Nautilus and let's right-click and show hidden files let's go into dot config and then awesome our C dot Lua we'll open it with G edit and we want to find the key binding for that run prompt which we know is super R so we could just scroll down and try to find it hopefully they left a comment that's obvious like hey here's the run launcher but I don't know I mean I could sit here and read or if I wanted to I could do a search I could do that I bet ctrl F to find here in G edit if I did launcher create a launcher no that's not yet about run prompt yeah there we go scroll up you see mod key which is the super key and our run this command which basically is the run prompt command I don't want that to do that anymore I want that to actually run D menu so where it says awful dot key mod key + R run this function and then the function it runs is this I'm gonna delete those two lines right there underneath the mod key or function delete those lines we want that to run a new function and the function we want this to run is awful dot util dot spawn and then parentheses space and then the word end and then a comma now where would you have gotten information about awful dot util dot spawn well it may occur somewhere in this config but what I would suggest is you guys go - awesome WM org that it's the homepage for the awesome window manager you have doc right here this is the documentation and you go into the documentation Lua API documentation for stable release and this is where you would find all the various libraries and functions and everything awful dot util is right here I mean you could there's so many and it's hundreds maybe thousands of stuff you can do here with the various lua functions here and awesome it is a very configurable window manager extreme customizability if you actually want to really deep dive into awesome I suggest reading the documentation if you really want to learn Lua I suggest reading the documentation but most people you know they just want to do some simple configs and I gave you this one here you'll use this one a lot this is for pretty much all your key bindings awful utils Mon basically it's saying hey if you type mod key + R I want you to spawn this program what do we want it to spawn spawn we want it to spawn deep menu underscore run because that's what we want it to run I think that needs to be in quotes either single quotes or double quotes I will do since I did double quotes earlier I'll do double quotes again for this one let's save and remember control super R restarts awesome so let's restart awesome so I get an error you know it defaults back to the default awesome config because remember you have a default awesome config in the slash Etsy folder so this is really cool with awesome when the window manager crashes it doesn't actually kick you back out to the login manager and you then you can't even log in because your awesome is broken now I just defaults to that default config that's on your system and you need to fix your config so obviously I know this here what I was just editing calls the problem really it was just this one line and just thinking about this a little bit I deleted two lines earlier but I only added one line the second line was a description actually I'm looking at it right here in the second line any time you add a key binding you probably want to add a description it's kind of important why is the description important because remember super s gives you your key bindings how does it know what to put here well it knows what to put here is because you put it in your config you're saying you know this key binding Super are runs the menu and then you're also putting this line description it will show them a new bar group equals launcher though that's exactly what will appear in here I go down you will see super R says run prompt Super pieces show the menu menu bar excuse me of course I copied this from down here we actually want this description to say run D menu group equals launcher that's the group that appears in because you see there's groups of key bindings and you have a launcher group down here yeah that's fine I will keep it in that group but I want the description to actually say run D menu now now I noticed that the description in these squiggly braces has a parenthesis at the very end of the line you guys see that that parenthesis at the end of the line where was the opening parenthesis it was way back here so that was what was causing the error we needed this line but we really needed that closing parenthesis so let's save and let's do the control super R and we're still having a problem let's see let me look at the code and see if I can figure out what I have done here it's just taking a guess I bet there needs to be a comma at the end of that line let's save ctrl super R again and no more errors so I think that was okay and if that was ok then super or should run demon you super r runs demon you so perfect the only thing I noticed is it did not relaunch nitrogen dash dash restore down here yeah it's not doing that but super or to run demon utilization this time I can just type NIT and yeah there is a wallpaper here you know what let's make sure that is working so let me quit out of awesome now to quit out of awesome I could hit super s to get all my default key bindings and it will tell me super shift Q quits awesome so super shift Q to quit awesome kicks you back out into the volume manager you got to log back in make sure awesome is chosen is let's log back in yeah it's not yeah no it did it drew our wallpaper so our auto start stuff is working so that's that's fine let me launch our terminal here and let me run that last X render command I did earlier so I'm gonna do the exclamation point followed by X render no spaces hit enter and it runs the last command that I ran that evolved the word X Ranger it's a little bash trick but when I run it and it redraws the screen it has the default wallpaper super control are to restart the window manager yeah it draws it again that is a little glitch probably because I'm in a VM and I'm adjusting the screen resolution you guys are probably not going to be playing with the screen resolution but when you are playing with that resolution you know it kind of conflicts right you end up getting kicked back to the default wallpaper instead of the one that nitrogen is setting they're kind of overriding each other but you guys already see how pretty easy it is to hack on this thing so now that what you have daemon you installed super or get you a much better run prompt here so PC man you know it's already here go back into dot config awesome your RC Lua go ahead and open it and whatever text editor you want to open it with and already I've shown you enough stuff you can really do whatever you want to do with this showing you how to do the Auto Start applications here and I should have zoomed in here so you could actually see that if I can zoom in here I don't normally use G edit assuming ctrl + + know one of the things about using tools that you don't normally use is I don't even know how to zoom in here so I do apologize about this guys I'm sure there's a way I just I don't know anything about this text editor I will try to leave some notes in the documentation may be in the show description exactly how we did the Auto Start application and then adding your own key bindings are pretty self-explanatory we already did this one right here for the prompt here which is not really the prompt anymore it's daemon you so will leave a comment but if I wanted to do some other key bindings well let's just copy so I'm gonna copy that and then I'm gonna paste another one down here and maybe I don't need a key binding to launch Firefox everybody needs a key binding to launch their browser I mean that's one of the things everybody uses all the time right is the web browser so we're going to do mod key plus something to launch the web browser Mikey B I'm gonna assume well let's not assume let's Super S to bring up our key bindings and just quickly peruse this does it look like there is anything set to mod key B I don't see one and it's very important because if you have something that's conflicting you know you're gonna have an error so mod key B for browser will run this command Firefox then we need to give it a description the description is in Firefox and then the group let's see what kind of groups we have to choose from that are already here we have awesome client launcher layout screen tags T MUX stuff let's create a new group then about applications I like that hit save then super control or again for restore awesome and of course our wallpaper gets messed up but again that's just a bug here in the VM but it restarted just fine so superbee should launch Firefox and it does by the way we are in floating mode here that's why Firefox is covering everything but of course you can adjust this to be in tiling mode full-screen mode here magnifier let's get back to towel although it didn't tell but it should tell I think from now on yeah now you actually have tiling mode super shift C to close the windows by the way you can read all of this in the default config' but super jay and super k to switch focus if I had something launched here H stop is on the left and it has focused but I could super shift J to move it to the other side or super shift J to move it back or super shift K to go the other direction yeah and that if I had more than two things open you would see super J goes one direction in the stack Super K goes the other direction in the stack and then I could grab something with super shift J and K so super shift J moves the window through the stack and super shift K moves it through the stack the other direction super chef C closes and of course this terminal this horrible genome terminal is asking me do I really want to close yes I do anyway that's just a little bit of what you can do very briefly getting started with awesome I didn't want to spend a ton of time configuring awesome because I want you guys to figure out what you want to do on your own if you're really just confused about what to do with awesome I mean you can grab my configs if you want to you can go to my dot files repository over on get lab and if you go into dot files you see dot config imagine this is my home directory dot config right awesome and then you can grab all of this stuff I've got more than just our C dot lua in mine i have an auto start dot s h file that basically is where I put all my auto start stuff but you can actually put it directly in the RC lua the way I did on this video I also have some themes you know my my awesome looks you know quite a bit different than the default awesome I don't recommend though you guys just grab somebody else's config and try to use it you can grab my configs and look at what i'm doing see what works for you see what doesn't but it's best if you write it from script up you know from the start yourself because then it's a lot easier for you to make it it's to it when you have something that you want done and awesome hey I wonder if awesome can do this or can do that especially when you go back and are trying to fix your own configs since you wrote it you you know what you did before where if you're trying to fool with somebody else's configs it's kind of hard to go back after the fact and hack on that thing because you didn't write it in the first place and just for a little bit of inspiration I will go ahead and show you guys my awesome desktop here and I've got the panel workspaces various widgets of course it drawls the wallpaper I've got rid of all the window decorations as well I don't need close buttons or whatever that are in there by default and awesome again that's to help new to tiling window manager users but it's extra space and you're never gonna use it because super shifts see to close a window right you're gonna get rid of all that stuff eventually you know it's just my config and play around with the layouts a little bit here anyway that's enough of me goofing off here before I go I need to thank these folks right here this episode was produced by Michael Mitchell Chris DJ Donnie Dylan George hello Nate Lambda Omri Rob Sean and Willie these guys are the producers of the show they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this show wouldn't have been possible show was also brought to you by all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my patrons over on patreon again sincere thank you to each and every one of those folks you want to support the channel you'll find me at distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace you