Awesome WM 3.5 released | Hacker News Reader

Awesome WM 3.5 released

article.gmane.org

34 pointsmatthiasv22 comments

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OT: Wow, is the GMANE interface ever god-awful. I always forget, and then end up clicking though and regretting it.

I'm surprised at the footprint of evilwm (217MB/62MB), as shown in the htop window here:

http://awesome.naquadah.org/w/images/6screenshot.jpg

I had always assumed it was pretty lean. I use evilwm, and on my system it weighs in at 32MB/2.2MB (virtual/resident).

What does awesome bring to the table that minimal WMs like ratpoison and evilwm do not?

(Not trying to get into a WM pissing match. I'm genuinely curious.)

Wow, awesome 3.4.13 uses 17000/7904 on my system at the moment.

FWIW, xmonad at 3480/1916 virt / res...

But I took care to make it lean.

To be fair, xmonad has no taskbar or widgets. I use Taffybar with it and it adds about 10Mb.

That's 62k resident, not 62m, and the screenshot is of awesome, not evilwm.

Now this is why I don't use AwesomeWM, config breaks every-damn-time.

I spent 30 minutes trying to convert my config from 3.4 to 3.5 and then gave up and came back to dwm, meanwhile it gained better support for multiple monitors, the only reason I used awesome in the first place...

yeah, it's been a nightmare converting all my old widgets... but in a way, I'm glad that projects like AwesomeWM have the freedom to break everyone's configs if it means newer coding standards. The alternative -- retaining support for all previous versions, at the expense of bloat -- is much less preferable.

It's debatable. In the real world, good APIs which evolve deprecate their obsolete parts instead of outright removing them. If that's too much bother, maybe it gets to show that APIs-as-configuration-files are a bad idea, especially with dynamic languages.

Awesome is the only API-as-configuration-file that I know of which consistently breaks the API between point releases.

I know this isn't necessarily a case, especially considering this is from a mailing list, but just like with the Enlightenment post a couple of days ago - how about some screenshots? A human-formatted "What's new" page? Yes, it's open source, there's no marketing effort, etc., but it would still be cool if I could see it and learn about it without giving up hours of my time.

The product page has some screenshots[1] as well as the wiki [2].

[1]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/ [2]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Screenshots

Does anyone know if Awesome has a one-workspace-per-monitor option yet? That's one of the things that drew me to xmonad instead. When you have multiple monitors, being able to change the workspace on each one individually is very useful.

Have not used this functionality. As I understand it's allready there, but a pain to configure, judging by the countless threads that come up on the mailing list about it.

I'm running awesome 3.4. In this version the functionality is there by default.

As long as I've used awesome (probably 6 months to a year now) I've been able to change my different monitor's workspaces independently using the default rc.lua.

Edit: Based on tessellated's response I may not be understanding the question. By workspace are you referring to the different "desktops" you can reach through the numbered boxes on the upper left (in the default config)?

> By workspace are you referring to the different "desktops" you can reach through the numbered boxes on the upper left (in the default config)?

Yes, it looks like awesome's "desktops" are equivalent to xmonad's "workspaces".

From awesome's home page:

> Real multihead support (XRandR, Xinerama or Zaphod mode) with per screen desktops (tags);

It looks like support is there. I might give it a shot again, but tessellated's comment about the difficulty of configuration isn't encouraging, particularly when I already have a working xmonad configuration with most of what I want.

In that case I (and tcoppi it seems) have never known it to not work. But I'm using the nvidia driver/xorg setup scripts, so maybe it does require some fiddling if you're doing all that by hand.

It's been like that for as long as I have used awesome (since 2.0ish, a few years now)

My understanding was that the key difference between awesome/xmonad workspaces, was that on awesome,you get X workspaces per screen, and on xmonad, you get X workspaces that you can display on any screens.

The main difference being that xmonad makes it easy to move a workspace from one screen to another (useful, if you have a laptop and you're unplugging a monitor), whereas in awesome when you remove an external monitor, you go for 2X workspaces to X workspaces and things are moved around.

Can anyone confirm my understanding of this?

You might also want to check out Wingo [1], which was specifically built with this feature in mind. It's a hybrid floating/tiling window manager with simple configuration.

[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

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