After 6 months of development and more than 1000 change sets, the final version of awesome 3.0 has been released. ‘awesome’ is a frame-work window manager, which also supports tiling window management. This major release brings a lot of new features. The whole configuration file is now write in the Lua language and use a simple API. This allows to modify and control every corner of the window manager. This version is based on XCB, a new low level library which communicate with the X server. Pango usage also enhances text rendering.
I use awesome for some month now, and it is really the best windows manager when you have 2 screen. It handle them almost by itself and windows never appear on both screen at the same if you dont move them manually that way. It also look really good, is fast, customizable and look nice!
My desktop (awesome 2.3)
http://img135.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot25lp9.png
Very nice desktop.
I see conky lists some of the processes. Can you post your “ps aux”, so that we can see the memory consumpton of Awesome and X?
Thanks.
I got hundred of firefox tabs open and many X server running with many apps in each virtual desktop, X take -a lot- of memory, but I don’t care because I got some. I may edit this post when I will reboot to display a clean one.
root 8949 5.9 0.8 393356 35804 tty7 RLs+ 21:52 0:06 X :0 -nolisten tcp -br -auth /home/lepagee/.serverauth.8932 -deferglyphs 16 (X= 34mb)
lepagee 8955 1.3 0.4 160872 19756 tty1 S 21:52 0:01 awesome (Awesome with all my script, widget, icons and event = 19mb)
lepagee 8961 0.4 0.8 118084 33960 tty1 S 21:52 0:00 idesk (idesk with the background (3360×1050 uncompressed PNG + 30 png icons) = 33mb)
lepagee 9447 0.2 0.1 38852 8060 pts/1 Sl 21:53 0:00 /usr/bin/ruby18 /usr/bin/amazing (system monitor = 7mb)
lepagee 8958 5.6 0.0 50420 3684 tty1 S 21:52 0:06 conky -c /home/lepagee/.conkyrc5 (conky = 3mb)
Most of this memory is shared (according to ksysguard) awesome use 8mb if I remove shared mem from the count. It is a lot compared to DWM, but I loaded a lot of pixmap and like all “useless feature” (according to suckless group) that they added.
That’s a really nice background / wallpaper, is it downloadable from somewhere?
I said it once, I said it twice… awesome isn’t awesome.
Fluxbox > all.
I’ve never used awesome, but I think that is just *your* opinion.
Right, but my opinion > your opinion.
This is not what our scores show.
I converted to Awesome about six months ago, and never want to go back to manually fiddling with window sizing or placement again.
Awesome works very well as a window manager with Gnome (echo ‘export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/local/bin/awesome’ >~/.gnomerc , and add padding for gnome toolbar in config). This lets me keep the Gnome Panel conveniences and menus. While Awesome has toolbar plugins to offer, they aren’t as mature and are much more difficult to configure.
I look forward to trying the new release.
(A bit off-topic but) I’ve been hoping that traditional window managers and desktop environments could implement more and better window tiling features too.
A minimalist tiling window manager like Awesome could be a bit too much for me (might be interesting to try it as the window manager of GNOME, however) but of its features I could find lots of use for better window tiling, also in GNOME, Xfce or KDE.
Consider the situation when you have many (GNOME; KDE; Xfce) windows open – on top of each other or at least not using all the desktop space efficiently by default – and you would want to tile and see all the windows simultaneously. What if you could just press a button and tile the windows instantly and automatically – instead of using lots of time dragging the many window borders to make all the windows sit nicely by each other?
Just my € 0.02 worth.
(EDIT: the euro sign I used above didn’t show correctly except after replacing the sign with its HTML special character code.)
Edited 2008-09-20 17:24 UTC
When you start to use a tiling window manager, you find that it is far more than just a layout helper. Much of the utility comes in the ability to instantly manipulate the layout.
Work on three gnome-terminals, the left half of the screen for one, the right half for two others. Instead of shifting focus to a small terminal, shift the windows so that the terminal you are currently focused on is in the large left half of the screen.
Switching between two side-by-side firefox windows, but the left page stubbornly needs more width? Win-l to shift the centerline to the right, Win-h to move it back.
Combine with window “tags” (=virtual desktop, with extras), and a keystroke will throw a window to some other desktop, where it will be nicely laid out for you when you want it later.
I use AwesomeWM since 2 monthes now, I was searching a nice looking, resources efficient, and screen space optimising WM for my eeePC running debian lenny, and now, I installed it on all my computers excepted the Mac (which runs OS X).
Only thing that disappointed me was the fact that config files are now in lua language instead of the config files of the 2.3.x versions, but it’s just a matter of 30 minutes to get used to and get back to a similar configuration.
Efficient, small size, fast, can be entirely keyboard-driven, easily configured if you take some time to learn the syntax, I shouldn’t go back to classicals overlapping WMs, especially on the eeepc little screen.
Edit : yeah, i’m an enthusiast
Edited 2008-09-20 17:40 UTC
Does anyone know where I can find a Fedora 9 RPM for this? Or at least know the “yum install” string I can use to install the .tar.gz’s compile dependences?