Getting Started With Awesome Window Manager

[@tchibu]

installed a tiling window maanager - sets window mode to floating. :D

[@BootError]

All of r/unixporn

[@Hexalyse]

Because it's more practical in the end

[@endorphinsu]

That's a dynamic wm

[@FruityHuevos]

@@Hexalyse a DE is more practical in the end lmao

[@itsgalaxy2407]

@@FruityHuevos nah you can do everything you can do with desktop environments using window managers EDIT: OMG THANKS FOR THE LIKES THIS IS THE MOST IVE EVER HAD OMG

[@LPFan33]

I like how you say "read the documentation", with a mug in the background saying "RTFM"

[@charbelsarkis3567]

What's rtfm

[@ImSumGuy]

@@charbelsarkis3567 read the fucking manual

[@draco5991rep]

@@charbelsarkis3567 'read the fantastic manual' for the SFW version 'read the fucking manual' for the NSFW version

[@daveshouldaine2520]

read the following manual ;)

[@for.you.tube.]

read the friendly manual :)

[@02KAINE]

I'm a Linux newbie but thanks to you and your patreons, I'm feeling much more comfortable digging deeper into this cool new dimension. Keep up the great work Derek.

[@glowiak3430]

dt: my password is super secure the password: "dt"

[@bartoszjaroszynski4711]

This is one of the only tutorials i watched to the end. And thats pretty rare for me. Really good job in explaining this, exactly what i needed. I am new to linux and installed manjaro today and am already trying to operate awesome only using hotkeys. Thanks for the great tutorial.

[@eriklundstedt9469]

I know I'm about a year late but did you know that awesome has booth a wallpaper setter and a better run-launcher built-in Super+p in the default config opens the better run-launcher It's got built-in history

[@C6438911]

I consider AwesomeWM to be a hybrid.. meaning if you want only floating windows with bars and open/close buttons, then you can have that. You can also remove window bars and buttons and have it only act as a tiling wm. I think that AwesomeWM is basically best of both worlds, you can float and/or you can tile. I mean moreso than most other tiling window managers.

[@coreylanier6021]

YES. I've been seeing some amazing layouts with Awesome, and have been tempted to switch over. Seeing this has helped.

[@GergiH]

I was about to install i3 again on my crappy laptop for performance (and then delete it a few days after because of frustration of how it handles notifications and such), but you convinced me this feels more awesome. I'm giving it a big try.

[@8-bit513]

If I remember correctly the built in run prompt has tab completion.

[@himanshushukla787]

what seriously??

[@ebon4265]

@@himanshushukla787 just checked, yes it does.

[@zerriox]

Just wachted the first 10min, but i wanted to say.. Man I just love the way you teach, especially that you're not just explaining once what a specific action does and then just saying 5 times do what we did there or press xy and type in xyz like many other's doing tutorials.. you're not just explaining, you're teaching us how to and what it does what while telling multiple times what it does if a specific step repeats, Which makes it much easier to learn and it also seems logical (example: Mention to remember -> Super +R opens the run promt)

[@jujijiju6929]

Had such content existed when I was starting out, it would've saved me days worth of frustration. This guy is doing public service really. Pay attention kids 😂

[@Cookiekeks]

I cant imagine learing linux without youtube, how did you learn it? With the manuals, or how else?

[@jujijiju6929]

@@CookiekeksMostly from other people who've been using it for longer, teachers, senior colleagues etc.. and sometimes books and manuals. I still remember... I learnt about compression formats like tar and zip and which tools to use to work with them from my college sysadmin while he was on his lunch break.

[@maladshikantaza9675]

@@jujijiju6929 That looks cool

[@JayXdbX]

Thank you good sir. My friend has been suggesting i use Awesome for awhile. I normally prefer cinnamon but after getting this running on arch i can safely say it feels alien but interesting and useful. I intend to keep using awesome. Main thing i like about awesome so far is how easy it is to switch workspaces. It makes placing windows in full screen mode extremely doable

Awesome, thanks! (no pun intended) I'm a new user of dwm (only a couple of weeks since I installed it), and I love it. I heard about it from Luke Smith about a year ago. What really made me want to install was its official description, which contains the following: "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions." Sign me up :D

[@migueltorrinhapereira7473]

I love the cmatrix runing in the background.

[@bologna3048]

I just started playing around with tiling managers and i gotta say.. i like the heck out of it, particularly awesome just because it's so versatile. It's funny I actually installed it, found the floating mode and was like "Neat... ok lets just turn that off." lol

[@ThomasWilliswin308]

But if your gonna run awesome having someone to hold your hand is helpful. So good job Derek.

[@RawInSeattle]

So glad I found your channel... rusty and needing to upgrade my skills,,, your the perfect fit, thanks

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Derek. One of the common complaints against Nautilus is that it no longer is tied to the "desktop" paradigm to display folders etc.

[@ViewerEm]

wait can you elaborate on what you mean by this

[@twb0109]

@@ViewerEm Nautilus is Gnome's file manager. GNOME 3 and up don't use desktop icons, so the file manager doesn't have that functionality.

[@WilliamLDeRieuxIV]

For anyone who doesn't know (maybe this should have been in the video): **SUPER** is The Windows / Command key..

[@godnyx117]

I'm gonna learn Lua to make some Neovim plugins and I also want to use Awsome. I think this video was made at the wright time for me!!!!

[@MegaDesalvo]

20:10 line 332, awful.key( opens a parentheses and when you delete the next lines, you did not close the parentheses with ). The error also says missing parentheses ')'.

[@bobbyfried7478]

i love your videos man i don't feel ashamed you have made me a better Linux Mint/ LMDE user i often show my wife the things you have shown us and she is a better linux mint user now also she loves Mint and won't let me change it. because her Mint is hers (as she puts it to me) so thanx again.

[@lonniebest4697]

By hitting super+s, I noticed that maybe the dmenu task in this video was unnecessary, because super-p already offers something that functions like dmenu. However, covering how to bind dmenu with a key was helpful for the purposes of demonstration. In videos like these, I wish you'd always cover how to adjust the size of what gets displayed on the screen. The fonts are so small by default! The first thing I want to know is how to make things bigger. I'll figure that out, though.

[@IWorkInPixels]

I would also like to know this. The shortcuts popup by default has like 3pt font and I can't find how to embiggen it on the Googles.

[@yotubeaccoutsuperawesome]

Watched this video 3 years ago and I've been using Linux with awesome ever since. This video made me switch to Linux from Windows lol.

[@mjdxp5688]

awesome is truly a blessing for me compared to i3 and DWM, which I had no clue where to even start. This video really helped me to get started.

[@greatestcait]

This is so incredibly helpful. Thanks, Distrotube!

[@vicyoslinuxofficial2607]

Could you show us how to remove those windows decorations and add this beautiful solid colors on awesome or hlwm or bspwm? Thank you very much. :)

[@victormartins-software3912]

Thank you man, I really enjoy how you teach, you put yourself on the student shoes and you are kind 🙏💓🙏

[@NOPerative]

Nitrogen, Polybar and Awesome or Openbox and go... Hard to go wrong with the above and it's good training considering tiling managers especially from an administrative/maintenance view point. Good vid.

[@old_geeky_Michael]

Excellent video, keen to try this out on my new Fedora install! Thanks DT.

[@cheromechero1188]

Come from the tilling Window manager video, thanks for doing this guide for noobs ;D

Why don't using Ctrl-l to clean the terminal? Ctrl-e to jump to the end of line? Alt . to past last command argument? Ctrl-d instead of exit? Would be possible a vídeo about that?

[@nickchristopoulos9613]

Good explanation DF, took me a while to keep up but lately i'm begining to follow. Thank you for your efforts!

[@alrightsquinky7798]

Tip: if you have dmenu installed, Awesome has the built in keybinding “Super+P” to open a dmenu application launch prompt. Don’t know when that keybinding was added, but it is currently a default binding.

[@roronoazoro-lh1jz]

this helped me my awsome install didnt have any thing couldnt open pkgs and was searching like hell

[@derekgoodwine7509]

This one of my favorite DT videos. No.1 top five reasons to Arch Linux. No.2 ArcoLinux Extended has all all the window manager. This one is No.3

[@sleepyeyesvince]

Maybe it's time I tried a different WM other than i3. Heard so many good things about awesome. Thanks for the tutorial. Hack on!

[@andrez76]

The strangest, "goodest" thing has just happened. I was watching an older video of yours, where you go over your workflow with awesome and wondering about how I could get started with it. I then opened a new KZbin tab and bam! There's this video, posted about 25min ago. :) Watching it now! Thanks!

[@ranska2506]

Hey with a friend we just restart to talk about tiling wm and I found your channel. This vidéo come on the perfect time !!! Thanks a lot you take time to do it step by step and it's help a lot.

[@brunnovert3631]

Thanks for sharing your configuration, this helped a lot!

[@joanapaulasoliveira]

Awesome was the only WM I was able to install inside Docker container, so I could play around with it.

[@LumbChu]

I wish I watched something like this when I was using Awesome. I prefer i3 to Awesome but it was a great introduction to dynamic tiling WM's.

[@poonikarthu4988]

i3 is a manual tiler... lol

[@akkesm]

This is perfect timing. I switched to AwesomeWM just this week.

[@ErtanKayalar-tr]

This is what i was looking for. Thanks DT!

[@FeedScrn]

Really good tutorial. You showed so many things about Awesome. I was wondering how it worked. @9:00 - Your image is great and clear in the play-in-play window. The main screen. .. kinda fuzzy dude.

[@englishtutor6310]

Isn't Awesome also customizable enough to have stacking windows as well?

[@ingokrispin3482]

It is. Most if not all tiling WMs can do stacking/floating as well. ;)

[@Soulskinner]

Loool.) I wanted to ask tutorial on WM, but thought that other topics have bigger priority. XD So thank you. I've installer Awesome a long time ago, but haven't used it.

[@keafoleafo8368]

Can we have a more in-depth tutorial on how to configure the panel itself? Like the color, workspace tags, start button, things like that?

[@JosueRodriguez08]

RTFM

[@keafoleafo8368]

@@JosueRodriguez08 I've tried. Many, many times. I wouldn't be asking for this if it was in there.

[@user-np7px6hn2e]

Great, can you please do a tutorial on how to get rid of title bars? I am using mint cinamon 20.

[@earnestredwood4694]

My man I will have to put some money in the hat. This is Awesome, can you get in to this a little deeper. I may be a part 2. I love working with the terminal.

[@SantiYounger]

thanks for the amazing and simple tutoriale very begginer friendly, thanks!

[@bag_of_pixels]

I don't see any reason for using tiling managers. In plasma you can just hide windows decorations and use built-in hotkeys (meta+arrows) to tile windows to any direction + add custom shortcuts

[@zootsuitpenguin]

So does awesome use less resources than the standard ubuntu desktop?

[@folksurvival]

Of course.

[@jr_Linux]

i'd love a video on how to write your config from scratch. i feel like instead of having everything and deleting stuff you don't want it should be easier. with a clean file. im just not sure about spacing and what things are required from the system install be nice to have a video because you do awesome on your config organization

[@mn_xd4624]

You can also use super + p(without dmenu) to show better menu

[@eMorphized]

Do you have to put & after commands in autostart in Lua files? You have to do that in Openbox, and in the Terminal as well. Also, according to r/unixporn, Awesome can create some really cool floating environments as well.

[@polite3606]

I have been an arch user for more than a year, configuring my i3 WM to my liking, when a day I finally decided to try another WM. I want to understand why so much people on reddit r/unixporn said to have migrated from i3 to Awesome. I am also fed up of the floating windows that opens in the back of a fullscreen window in i3. You gave me the two essential informations (and the two things I have really done with my i3 config) that I was searching for : how to change default shortcuts, and launch applications at start. Let's hope I will be able to start my redshift-gtk app only after I've got some Internet connection. But yeah, I agree with you, only the documentation can really help :)

[@WilliamLDeRieuxIV]

13:27 I really don't like how the *nitrogen* preferences menu opened at the lower-left corner of the screen rather then being in the center of the screen (at least the center of the window). That's just like having a window open on one monitor and the context menu appears on a completely different monitor -- that's just frustrating.

[@eskrest]

Good day, DT, and thank you for your content. Is there a list of any kind where can I find all the necessary components like a compositor, login manager, this password service I can't remember the name of?

[@KipIngram]

You don't give sudo your ROOT password. You give it your USER password - you're authenticating that yes, you are the user. And that user has to be in the sudoers list.

[@The1mAgiN4ry]

I guess you learn something new everyday, I would have never noticed as I use the same password for both the root and user.

[@liet9280]

Hi, why did you use floating mode when configured awesomeWM? I have never seen people use tiling mode besides the terminal.

[@PaulSpades]

Fantastic. You installed a tiling window manager, screwed around with the lua script and managed to not tile any window while doing it.

[@rbtmdl]

I've used Larswm. I'm just not a big fan of tiling managers, though I can see how useful they are.

[@johalun]

Thanks for this video! I'm now considering switching from Regolith (i3) to awesome (mostly because of Lua) :)

[@DevAngelo]

Thanks DT!!

[@Tn5421Me]

What you can do to figure out your startup applications is to open "Startup Applications" in your DE, then click edit on each entry. That's how I found out what commands launch what programs without tearing my hair out.

[@wolfmunroe]

Installed Awesome recently and walked through your set-up just now. The issue you were having with the background not reloading when you Super+CTRL+R to reload Awesome was also a problem I experienced, and I am not in a virtual machine. The background reloads when I actually log into Awesome again, but not when I reload Awesome from inside the client. In order to get the background back I have to run nitrogen --restore manually. (I'm on LinuxMint 21.3.) I need to figure out next how to get my text on the bar to be bigger because mine did not resize when I reload awesome and the bar and menu is very tiny.

[@peter_hauer]

Tried Awesome now after using i3 some time where Super+Shift+Q was closing active tiles. 😂 First thing I had to change in Awesome, muscle-memory and so...

[@Jess-hj8vu]

lol I used i3 long ago and recently got back into tilling window managers and started using dwm. I still had the same muscle memory but just decided to deal with it (:

[@twb0109]

@@Jess-hj8vu how do you cope with having to logout everytime you want to make a change to the config file?

[@shubhamdwivedi7766]

DT=window manager expert All hail DT:)

[@shubhamdwivedi7766]

@A Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman will disagree😅

[@egmluvr]

Just installed awesome on Alpine Linux. I think I'm all in on tilers!

[@nikolas8741]

Awesome ! Thanks for sharing !

[@fadetoblack1026]

I tried installing awesome in Zorin OS 16 and I cannot switch over to it. There is no option on my login screen to change the session and I cannot find any documentation online on how to change sessions in Zorin.

[@iampraneetkumar]

Hey Derek Even today the nitrogen wallpaper bug is happening in awesome wm, i don't think it's a bug, i think the autostart application shouldn't be there at the bottom or some thing we are missing, i think the autostart apps should be under the mod+ctrl+r (reload the confg), i'll try to make it work, after logging in it's working great but as soon as you reload the config with shortcut key(mod+ctrl+r) it goes back to default ugly looking wallpaper.

[@piotr.kaczmarski]

Much appreciated, thank you!

[@SunnySingh-wz3ky]

Is there a way to get intellisense or error checking against the actual awesome libraries, in editors like VS Code?

[@darthcabs]

Hey, DT, do you happen to have your lua.rc that you showcased in the end, with pink borders and decorations removed, commited somewhere? I'd love to use it as base and play around. Thanks!

[@DistroTube]

Check my GitLab. Link is in the show notes.

[@FerralVideo]

I used to use Openbox back in the days when I first started using Linux in the 2.6 days. As I look at my fleet of aging computers and laptops, I consider an extremely light weight option to bring these systems as far into the modern era as I can. I then look at my daily drivers and gaming computers, and wonder how I can optimize the frick out of them to get as much OS out of my way to free my resources up for GAME. This got me back into looking at window managers, rather than complete DEs, for these use cases. I don't think I'm ready to go all-in on a tiling manager, so my attention went to Awesome.

[@nullerror4049]

he dt! i took your esme dot files an changed out some programs and binds. only thing i cant figure out is the top bar. how do i change the colors and and maybe remove the weather widget. i also noticed the volume widget does nothing on click so i guess i need another program. great expiriance tho. decided to main drive awesome under endevouros on my old laptop and its snapy!

[@bosmanka]

@dwt1 Your dotfiles for Awesome work perfectly. One thing I can't find out. Where do I change settings in that beautiful top bar? I'm getting tired of switching directories, searching for the right file in which I can change things.

[@Subzearo]

It is quite awesome. It's what I use now. It was the first WM I installed but I got put off by the config and moved to i3 back when I was a noob.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

great tutorial. thanks I am gona try this

[@dragon3602010]

is there a good version on Windows 10 ? Thanks

[@dynamitestyle8678]

Why did the scroll direction change when I change to Awesome? How do I change that?

[@p4u1ro13]

nice "Aweomsome WM Config", tyvm

[@FullStackDevelopersLab]

So I'm wanting to load awesome on to a fresh debian load with no existing wm. I'm having no luck any ideas?

[@ttt-sq6ou]

Nice man. I’ve really been enjoying your videos. I installed jwm last night to mess with. But now I’m wondering if I should use awesome. I have a question tho. There isn’t going to be a battery indicator (I use a laptop) a network connection icon or like a way to adjust audio in the tool bar by default right?

[@williamhiner8849]

Derek, you are a godsend my friend. i consider myself a noob but ive been using Pop! OS for about 2 years, but that doesnt count because its too easy. your vids are great, you are a very good teacher. maybe a tutorial on how to install a tar.xz for us noobs?

[@SoundblasterYT]

Just curious what are the benefits of a tiling window manager?

[@zippycat]

i've used dwm on my linux mint setup, but i wanted to try out other window managers, personally for me it was fine. one thing for sure you can use whatever suits you the best wether its a desktop envirovement like gnome or cinnamon, or a tiling window manager like dwm or awesome. cant decide which i like more personally

[@vasachisenjubean5944]

How do i zoom in and enlarge the font ? The fonts are extremely small on every single app

[@dom6477]

Great video. After trying on my VM, I'm doing this on my computer. If you're on Arch / Manjaro, you should use picom instead of compton.

[@daddyodevil8686]

A much needed tutorial, thanks a lot dt

[@bluecxmbo8836]

thank you for this video,i thought awesome would be hard to customize and stuff but now it seems not so hard

[@daedreaming6267]

What terminal emulator are you using for transparency? I am using the gnome-terminal and I do not see the option for transparency. I have compton installed as well.

[@ericr5481]

Is there a desktop environment that is like a window manager that comes with the tools to do things like join wifi or pair Bluetooth devices and stuff like that? I feel like it would take me months to get into a window manager, because of all the time required to find the tools and things necessary to be able to do things like join wifi and pair Bluetooth.

[@ramirolopezvazquez4636]

I can't use the "tap to click" and multimedia keys of my computer when running awesome window manager. I anything I can to to solve this issue?

[@kjlw99]

I got stuck on which version of Compton or picom to use for my compositor on Manjaro. Any suggestions or pros|cons?

[@willywantoknow2563]

Is there a way to merge awesome with manjaro i3? I'm rather curious to how much i can play with manjaro without messing too much with AUR.

[@GiorgioBeltrammi]

Thank you so much!

[@thomas.alexander.]

I have an install of Vanilla Arch & KDE. I have a working install of i3 WM on here too, but I haven't used it as much as I thought I would. I just installed Awesome WM, after seeing this video, but none of the menu structions are the same and I can't get any keyboard shortcuts to work "out of the box". Does anyone have any tips to get this to work on Arch?

[@gogogogogogogogogogog9]

nice tutorial my first wm for me was dwm and i did not look back since then

[@stalepoutine4768]

I installed Awesome on Arch using the command sudo pacman -S awesome and booted into Awesome, but I am lacking the menu that you showed with super+w and many of the commands don't work. I cannot open a terminal using the keybindings so I have to open a prompt to type in konsole (I use KDE otherwise) in order to do stuff in it. What could be the reason?