Re: advice

[Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen]

Since i3 is not programmable there will naturally be things you can't do
with i3. Out of the box I'd say that i3 is prettier than awesome.

Awesome and i3 both have plain text configs, remember that lua code is
written in plain text :). I don't know of the i3 community, but I know that
the awesome community is really nice.

The largest difference, which probably is the difference which should make
you choose between the window managers is that one has manual tiling and
the other dynamic tiling.
Awesome has dynamic tiling. This means that you set a layout, and the
windows are tiled according to the layout. For example there's a layout
that places one window to the left filling up the entire left of the
screen, and the rest of the windows are stacked to the right.
i3 has manual tiling, this means that you simply move the windows around in
a grid you change to your liking.
Manual tiling sounds nice, but personally there's always a layout which
places the windows the way I want, and when you use a layout, it's faster
than manual placement.

Note that one of the layout rules in awesome is floating which makes every
single window a floating window, which many find useful. This is not
possible in i3.



ons. 9. sep. 2015 kl. 04.50 skrev Ray Andrews :

> On 09/08/2015 02:02 PM, Paweł Rumian wrote:
> > If awesome won't appeal to you, you can give i3 a try - I remember
> > that I liked it really a lot - in some aspects more than awesome.
> Paweł
>
> That's the other one I'm thinking of trying.  From what I hear, it's
> 'easier' but less powerful.  How would you rate them side by side? They
> say the docs are better and it's plain text config. But they will not
> have such a helpful community ;-)
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.
>

RE: advice

[David Sorkovsky]

 

G'Day Ray,

 

As a point of introduction, I use awesome for pretty much all the reasons
you note and most have been answered, but I'd like to add that you need not
be put off if you are NOT looking for a tiling window manager.

 

I don't often use the advance features - I usually just use
"Floating" most of the time with one app per tag

Thanks to the lua config I have some applications that
automatically maximize to a "tag" which I then use just like it was on its
own "desktop"

 

PS: For multiple monitors I played a bit and ended up with a really simply
xorg.conf - Two monitors with a "virtual" desktop of the total area [and you
can even place floating windows so they overlap both screens (not that you'd
really want to)

 

 

Regards 

 

Dave

 

  _  

From: Ray Andrews [mailto:rayandr...@eastlink.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, 9 September 2015 3:59 AM
To: awesome@naquadah.org
Subject: advice

 

Gentlemen,

I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.B All I really want is
the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I have
dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.B I hate trying to
configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.B I'd like text
configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and restore.

Awesome seems well spoken of.B What can you guys tell me?B I can't think
what to specifically ask.B It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of the
box.B I don't need fancy effects.B I want windows on screens that I can
resize, maximize, minimize, etc.B Nice if they snap to borders to avoid
wasted space.B Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can change
to, that's good.B The mouse has to work.B I need custom keyboard shortcuts.B
Basically nothing strange.B I don't want to have to spend six months
learning Lua.B I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM that is usable
but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles.

Advice?

Re: advice

[Alexander Tsepkov]

Honestly, I hate lua. I love python, but lua isn't that similar to python.
With that said, I've learned enough lua to customize my config and most of
the harder logic I typically outsource to python or bash. As mentioned
earlier, awesome's ability to spawn a script as if it's run from terminal
is very handy. I often have lua trigger a python/bash script (which does
the actual work) and then process its output to display via naughty
(awesome's notification system) or the systray. I do this for temperature
widget, volume control, google calendar sync widget, as well as a few
others.

With that said, there are a number of widgets already written in lua you
can just use for these common tasks:
http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/User_Contributed_Widgets

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Ray Andrews  wrote:

> On 09/08/2015 11:29 PM, Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen wrote:
>
>>
>> Awesome and i3 both have plain text configs, remember that lua code is
>> written in plain text :).
>>
> True!  Even 'plain text' config must have syntax.  As long as lua isn't
> too horrible, like Java :-(
> I'm fluent in C.
>
> I don't know of the i3 community, but I know that the awesome community is
>> really nice.
>>
>
> Yes, I've had so much help already, and I'm not even a user yet.  I will
> get my sh** together, and give it a go.
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.
>

Re: advice

[Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen]

I'm not convinced that java is a terrible language, it has a really good
standard library, and with lambdas in the newer versions it really is
becoming more useful. The problem is simply that it has a lot of
boilerplate, but this simply means it's more designed for larger projects.
Anyway if you're fluent in C, you should grasp the concepts of programming
and as long as you can keep track of the 1 based indexing you shouldn't
have a problem.

You could of course always ask the mailing list if you're having issues
with your configuration.

- Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen

Email: kristof...@ryhl.dk
Tlf: +45  23 70 75 12


2015-09-09 16:55 GMT+02:00 Ray Andrews :

> On 09/08/2015 11:29 PM, Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen wrote:
>
>>
>> Awesome and i3 both have plain text configs, remember that lua code is
>> written in plain text :).
>>
> True!  Even 'plain text' config must have syntax.  As long as lua isn't
> too horrible, like Java :-(
> I'm fluent in C.
>
> I don't know of the i3 community, but I know that the awesome community is
>> really nice.
>>
>
> Yes, I've had so much help already, and I'm not even a user yet.  I will
> get my sh** together, and give it a go.
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.
>

Re: advice

[Abraham Baker]

Alex mentioned compositors, which reminded me of a question I should have
asked ages ago:

The last time I tried enabling compositing (to get transparent terminals so
I can see my wallpapers), I found that using compton led to the terminal
text not refreshing fast enough (e.g. while scrolling in ranger or
newsbeuter), so I had to disable it.  I notice that I can enable
transparency in the awesome wm interface itself without problems (using
rgba), so I'm not sure exactly what went wrong. Is there currently a
solution to this, or has anyone else even had this problem?


On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Bruno Ferreira <chal...@chalkos.net> wrote:

> @ray I like the configurations that get installed with Manjaro Awesome
> respin (https://github.com/Culinax/manjaro-awesome-respin). The initial
> configuration may be too minimal. I don't know if you need to install
> packages besides awesome to use this config. use the virtual machine first.
>
> @alexander try searching for "awesome wm" instead of just "awesome"
>
> Cumprimentos,
> Bruno Ferreira
>
> 2015-09-08 19:14 GMT+01:00 Alexander Tsepkov <atsep...@gmail.com>:
>
>> Not sure what you want to hear. If you've expecting to hear a sales pitch
>> on awesome, I don't think there is a need, you're installing a free wm, not
>> buying a car, just test it in virtualbox first if you're worried. If you're
>> asking about specific features of a modern wm, they're all there - some not
>> through vm itself (for example I installed awesome on top of xfce and use
>> thunar file manager, and several xfce widgets). It's been a while since I
>> installed awesome, I didn't like the idea of tiling wms at first, but now
>> got so used to it I installed hammerspoon on my OSX to emulate it.
>>
>> Awesome works fine out of the box, I don't remember if I had to do
>> anything to get my dual-monitors working but xrandr drives that and I
>> mapped windows+P to switch between display setups via bash script. One
>> thing to note is that keyboard shortcuts weren't intuitive to me right away
>> so I switched some around. The default theme is also pretty ugly, but
>> replacing it with one of preset ones from github is pretty easy (
>> https://github.com/copycat-killer/awesome-copycats). It also doesn't
>> come with a compositor at first (so no shadows or transparent windows you
>> may be used to), but that's a good thing since it gives you more
>> flexibility. I use compton as my compositor and really like it. Unless you
>> plan to customize your look and feel, you don't really need much lua. There
>> are available widgets like volume, networking, etc. you can plug in (and
>> will need to do if your theme doesn't already come with them). My only pet
>> peeve with awesome is it's name, try googling for anything regarding
>> awesome and see how often the first page contains a relevant result.
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ray Andrews <rayandr...@eastlink.ca>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Gentlemen,
>>>
>>> I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want
>>> is the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I
>>> have dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate
>>> trying to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.
>>> I'd like text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and
>>> restore.
>>>
>>> Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't
>>> think what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly
>>> out of the box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens
>>> that I can resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to
>>> borders to avoid wasted space.  Xfce gives normally six or so desktops
>>> than you can change to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need
>>> custom keyboard shortcuts.  Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to
>>> have to spend six months learning Lua.  I want a simple, predictable,
>>> configurable WM that is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and
>>> whistles.
>>>
>>> Advice?
>>>
>>
>>
>

Re: advice

[Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen]

em). My only pet
>> peeve with awesome is it's name, try googling for anything regarding
>> awesome and see how often the first page contains a relevant result.
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ray Andrews <rayandr...@eastlink.ca>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Gentlemen,
>>>
>>> I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want
>>> is the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I
>>> have dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate
>>> trying to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.
>>> I'd like text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and
>>> restore.
>>>
>>> Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't
>>> think what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly
>>> out of the box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens
>>> that I can resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to
>>> borders to avoid wasted space.  Xfce gives normally six or so desktops
>>> than you can change to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need
>>> custom keyboard shortcuts.  Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to
>>> have to spend six months learning Lua.  I want a simple, predictable,
>>> configurable WM that is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and
>>> whistles.
>>>
>>> Advice?
>>>
>>
>>
>

Re: advice

[Ray Andrews]

Thanks for the replies all.  It is also good to know there's a helpful 
community attached to awesome.


On 09/08/2015 01:08 PM, Kristoffer Ryhl-Johansen wrote:

...


/The mouse has to work./
The mouse moves around when you move your physical mouse around, and 
clicks on things when you press the physical button on the mouse. I'm 
not sure what kind of answer you're expecting here.


Just that I can resize by grabbing edges, and drag windows around with 
the mouse ... all the things I'm used to ... unless of course there are 
now better ways.

/I need custom keyboard shortcuts./
In the configuration file you have a list of keyboard commands, so you 
can just add your own. They can perform arbitrary lua code.


Can they call external programs?  I expect so.  I wrote something in C 
for jumping my mouse pointer around, it's very simple but it works and 
there's nothing like it in xfce, mind  I expect that awesome will be 
able to do the same sort of thing natively.

Re: advice

[Paweł Rumian]

2015-09-08 23:06 GMT+02:00 Ray Andrews :
> The mouse has to work.
>> The mouse moves around when you move your physical mouse around, and clicks
>> on things when you press the physical button on the mouse. I'm not sure what
>> kind of answer you're expecting here.
>
> Just that I can resize by grabbing edges, and drag windows around with the
> mouse ... all the things I'm used to ... unless of course there are now
> better ways.

The first one is possible with use of the modifier key, the latter is
difficult and very rarely used.
I think you will benefit a lot from this reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

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To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.

Re: advice

[Alexander Tsepkov]

The window resizing is slightly different and better imo than regular wm.
By default mouse can only interact with the contents of the window, but
holding windows key (mod4) makes mouse interact with the window itself. If
you hold windows and left-click, you will drag the window around. If you
hold windows and right-click, awesome will grab the closest corner of the
window to mouse location and let you resize the window via that corner.

You can call whichever external programs you create shortcuts for. There
are two types of spawning, spawn the program directly (most gui programs
will fall into this category) or spawn a terminal and then spawn a command
inside of it (this is your scripts and vim and stuff). I also have kupfer
mapped to windows+space and I use that as my spawn manager. By default
awesome uses windows+space to cycle between tiling layouts (and
windows+shift+space to cycle backwards), which I changed to windows+pgup
and windows+pgdn, respectively.

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 5:12 PM, Paweł Rumian  wrote:

> 2015-09-08 23:06 GMT+02:00 Ray Andrews :
> > The mouse has to work.
> >> The mouse moves around when you move your physical mouse around, and
> clicks
> >> on things when you press the physical button on the mouse. I'm not sure
> what
> >> kind of answer you're expecting here.
> >
> > Just that I can resize by grabbing edges, and drag windows around with
> the
> > mouse ... all the things I'm used to ... unless of course there are now
> > better ways.
>
> The first one is possible with use of the modifier key, the latter is
> difficult and very rarely used.
> I think you will benefit a lot from this reading:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.
>

Re: advice

[Paweł Rumian]

As Alexander said above, just go and try it, really. There is no risk involved.

Personally I can say that Awesome is one of two best things that
happened to me in the Un*x world in last years (the second one is
mastering Vim).
But I was immediately hooked to the idea of tiling WM, and just tried
all of those that were available five years ago - I stayed with
Awesome as it was best in handling multiple monitors at that time.

If awesome won't appeal to you, you can give i3 a try - I remember
that I liked it really a lot - in some aspects more than awesome.

Paweł

2015-09-08 19:58 GMT+02:00 Ray Andrews <rayandr...@eastlink.ca>:
> Gentlemen,
>
> I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want is
> the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I have
> dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate trying to
> configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.  I'd like text
> configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and restore.
>
> Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't think
> what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of the
> box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens that I can
> resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to borders to avoid
> wasted space.  Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can change
> to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need custom keyboard shortcuts.
> Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to have to spend six months
> learning Lua.  I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM that is usable
> but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles.
>
> Advice?

--
To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.

Re: advice

[Ray Andrews]

On 09/08/2015 02:02 PM, Paweł Rumian wrote:

If awesome won't appeal to you, you can give i3 a try - I remember
that I liked it really a lot - in some aspects more than awesome.

Paweł

That's the other one I'm thinking of trying.  From what I hear, it's 
'easier' but less powerful.  How would you rate them side by side? They 
say the docs are better and it's plain text config. But they will not 
have such a helpful community ;-)



--
To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.

advice

[Ray Andrews]

Gentlemen,

I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want 
is the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I 
have dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate 
trying to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.  
I'd like text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and restore.


Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't think 
what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of 
the box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens that I 
can resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to borders to 
avoid wasted space. Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can 
change to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need custom keyboard 
shortcuts. Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to have to spend six 
months learning Lua. I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM that 
is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles.


Advice?

Re: advice

[Alexander Tsepkov]

Not sure what you want to hear. If you've expecting to hear a sales pitch
on awesome, I don't think there is a need, you're installing a free wm, not
buying a car, just test it in virtualbox first if you're worried. If you're
asking about specific features of a modern wm, they're all there - some not
through vm itself (for example I installed awesome on top of xfce and use
thunar file manager, and several xfce widgets). It's been a while since I
installed awesome, I didn't like the idea of tiling wms at first, but now
got so used to it I installed hammerspoon on my OSX to emulate it.

Awesome works fine out of the box, I don't remember if I had to do anything
to get my dual-monitors working but xrandr drives that and I mapped
windows+P to switch between display setups via bash script. One thing to
note is that keyboard shortcuts weren't intuitive to me right away so I
switched some around. The default theme is also pretty ugly, but replacing
it with one of preset ones from github is pretty easy (
https://github.com/copycat-killer/awesome-copycats). It also doesn't come
with a compositor at first (so no shadows or transparent windows you may be
used to), but that's a good thing since it gives you more flexibility. I
use compton as my compositor and really like it. Unless you plan to
customize your look and feel, you don't really need much lua. There are
available widgets like volume, networking, etc. you can plug in (and will
need to do if your theme doesn't already come with them). My only pet peeve
with awesome is it's name, try googling for anything regarding awesome and
see how often the first page contains a relevant result.

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ray Andrews <rayandr...@eastlink.ca> wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want is
> the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I have
> dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate trying
> to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.  I'd like
> text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and restore.
>
> Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't think
> what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of
> the box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens that I
> can resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to borders to
> avoid wasted space.  Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can
> change to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need custom keyboard
> shortcuts.  Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to have to spend six
> months learning Lua.  I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM that
> is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles.
>
> Advice?
>

Re: advice

[Bruno Ferreira]

@ray I like the configurations that get installed with Manjaro Awesome
respin (https://github.com/Culinax/manjaro-awesome-respin). The initial
configuration may be too minimal. I don't know if you need to install
packages besides awesome to use this config. use the virtual machine first.

@alexander try searching for "awesome wm" instead of just "awesome"

Cumprimentos,
Bruno Ferreira

2015-09-08 19:14 GMT+01:00 Alexander Tsepkov <atsep...@gmail.com>:

> Not sure what you want to hear. If you've expecting to hear a sales pitch
> on awesome, I don't think there is a need, you're installing a free wm, not
> buying a car, just test it in virtualbox first if you're worried. If you're
> asking about specific features of a modern wm, they're all there - some not
> through vm itself (for example I installed awesome on top of xfce and use
> thunar file manager, and several xfce widgets). It's been a while since I
> installed awesome, I didn't like the idea of tiling wms at first, but now
> got so used to it I installed hammerspoon on my OSX to emulate it.
>
> Awesome works fine out of the box, I don't remember if I had to do
> anything to get my dual-monitors working but xrandr drives that and I
> mapped windows+P to switch between display setups via bash script. One
> thing to note is that keyboard shortcuts weren't intuitive to me right away
> so I switched some around. The default theme is also pretty ugly, but
> replacing it with one of preset ones from github is pretty easy (
> https://github.com/copycat-killer/awesome-copycats). It also doesn't come
> with a compositor at first (so no shadows or transparent windows you may be
> used to), but that's a good thing since it gives you more flexibility. I
> use compton as my compositor and really like it. Unless you plan to
> customize your look and feel, you don't really need much lua. There are
> available widgets like volume, networking, etc. you can plug in (and will
> need to do if your theme doesn't already come with them). My only pet peeve
> with awesome is it's name, try googling for anything regarding awesome and
> see how often the first page contains a relevant result.
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ray Andrews <rayandr...@eastlink.ca>
> wrote:
>
>> Gentlemen,
>>
>> I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter.  All I really want
>> is the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I
>> have dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors.  I hate
>> trying to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes.
>> I'd like text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and
>> restore.
>>
>> Awesome seems well spoken of.  What can you guys tell me?  I can't think
>> what to specifically ask.  It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of
>> the box.  I don't need fancy effects.  I want windows on screens that I
>> can resize, maximize, minimize, etc.  Nice if they snap to borders to
>> avoid wasted space.  Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can
>> change to, that's good.  The mouse has to work.  I need custom keyboard
>> shortcuts.  Basically nothing strange.  I don't want to have to spend
>> six months learning Lua.  I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM
>> that is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles.
>>
>> Advice?
>>
>
>