Recipes for awesome

‎

27 Jan 2024

This page contains recipes for the awesome window manager.

Quake

This recipe a implements a dropdown Quake style view of windows. You can attach and detach windows from the view dynamically.

It works like this:

To attach a window you focus on it and press Mod + Shift + `
Then to show/hide the window you press Mod + `
To detach the window focus on it and press Mod + Shift + ` or attach another window

Install

Download the code quake.lua and place it somewhere in your awesome config directory. For this example we will save it in: ~/.config/awesome/drastik/quake.lua

After downloading import the module in your rc.lua

local quake = require("drastik.quake")

Then intialize and configure it. A complete table of all the configuration options can be found below.

local quake = quake({ height = 0.45 })

At last, insert the following in the configuration section of your rc.lua:

awful.util.table.join(
    ...

    -- Quake-like dropdown program/terminal
    awful.key({modkey, },        "`", function () quake:toggle() end),
    awful.key({modkey, "Shift"}, "`", function () quake:use_focused() end),

    ...
)

Now restart awesome (with Mod + Control + r) and everything should work.

Known issues

Restarting awesome when a window is attached will cause the window to detach. This happens because when awesome restarts we no longer know which window was attached.

To fix this we could save the pid of the client somewhere in /tmp and read it when awesome emits the startup signal. Because I am not interested in this feature, I did not implement it. If you really want it, then send me an email and I might try to get it to work.

License

This recipe is based on the quake utility from this project: https://github.com/lcpz/lain

License: GPLv2