That's... awesome

[ch_123]

Any of the more serious Linux users around will have at very least heard of the Awesome Window Manager. The author of Awesome has this pic on his page -



I'm not sure whether that's his setup or not, but even zoomed out, the keyboard should look familiar...

EDIT: Just after I posted this, I had memories of someone posting this picture before. Well, might as well leave it up anyway...

[HaaTa]

Wooo, Awesome user since Fall 2008. Before that I was a WMII/DWM user.

[AndrewZorn]

yeah, someone here posted that

i tried awesome but just couldnt do it
use openbox now

[ch_123]

I reinstalled Arch earlier on, and I'm giving it a try. If I don't like it, I'll move to Openbox. That said, I'm finding it quite good so far, but it does take some getting used to given how different it is.

[HaaTa]

The multi monitor support is what kept me using it.
Though, its a little bit annoying that my configurations keep breaking with each new version (mind you I was running the latest git versions for almost a year).

Though you really need to find a terminal emulator that suites your needs.
For me it was urxvt (rxvt-unicode) at first, but I found it somewhat clunky at times. Eventually forked a Qt4 (no KDE) terminal emulator, added daemon support, transparency, xml configs, and a sane default colour scheme. I want to add true OpenGL support and variable width tabs (so window resizing does suck so much), but I've been short on time lately. Oh and maybe port it to Windows.

Though it helped that the person who convinced me to start using awesome is/was a regular on the awesome irc channel so he was always telling me all the cool things I could do with it. The same guy made the sky theme (can't remember if its still included by default) and started the Obvious widgets project for awesome.

[ch_123]

Oddly enough, the guy who introduced me to Awesome (in my class in college) also uses urxvt... What are it's advantages? I'm currently using Terminator at the moment.

[HaaTa]

Hmm, some of the features (though not as killer as they used to be):

• Unicode support
• Daemon mode (very fast)
• Craploads of compiler flags (the source code as defines everywhere so you can make it as lightweight as possible)
• Perl support (for scriptability, an example would be for clicking on URLs, or tabs)
• Transparency support
• Doesn't depend on GTK or Qt

Read here for some more.

I personally like it for the lack of menus, and the craploads of options it has.

I'm also kinda biased against anything GTK/Gnome based, so I try to avoid programs that are linked to them.

[AndrewZorn]

I reinstalled Arch earlier on, and I'm giving it a try. If I don't like it, I'll move to Openbox. That said, I'm finding it quite good so far, but it does take some getting used to given how different it is.

openbox is a window manager.
i use openbox ON arch.

[exia]

three 30" LCDs are better than 6 low res screens

[Xuan]

I'm also an awesome user.
It's the first tiling wm I used and I got used to it really fast, now it feels very natural.
I also use urxvt, I don't know if it's that superior, it just gets the job done.

[D-EJ915]

three 30" LCDs are better than 6 low res screens

This is definitely not true, completely depends on what you are doing.

Also that guy likes IRC.

[itlnstln]

I have a quick question that's slighly OT (shocker): how do you connect that many monitors to your PC?  I would love to have a third monitor, but I am not sure how to connect one.  I suppose you have to have an additional video adapter of some sort.

[itlnstln]

Put in another gfx card.

That's what I figured.  Thanks.

[timw4mail]

That's what I figured.  Thanks.

Or you get one of those crazy 4+ monitor cards from Matrox.

[itlnstln]

Or you get one of those crazy 4+ monitor cards from Matrox.

That's what I was thinking.  I remember those from back in the day, but you don't see them as much anymore.  I really haven't played around much with having multiple video cards, though.  I'll have to see if there is one I can steal around the office.  I'm sure I can come up with something.

[itlnstln]

That's what I figured. When I was a kid back in the DOS days, multiple video cards wouldn't work for various reasons. Since then, though, I really haven't had the desire to try it again.

[timw4mail]

That's what I figured. When I was a kid back in the DOS days, multiple video cards wouldn't work for various reasons. Since then, though, I really haven't had the desire to try it again.

I think Windows 98 (SE?) was the last major OS to add support multiple monitors.

[itlnstln]

Those are pretty lame.  I shouldn't talk, though.  I have Logitech Z-680s on my rig.  Other than the old Klipsch 5.1 setup, they were one of the best computer 5.1 setups available at the time.  They were some of my favorites, too, because the speaker wire was upgradeable.  Their successors (I don't remember the model number off-hand) had fixed wires (but a better sub).

[itlnstln]

The high end speaker business is dead anyway. Especially for computers. Headphones and trashed out iBuds.

That's a shame, too. Headphones can be good, but I prefer to sit back in my recliner and listen to real speakers. I feel they give a better soundstage than headphones as the speakers are actually in front of you.

[pikapika]

i also use awesome at work, i used wmii, dwm and ion3 before, but i must confess i use e17 at home

[chongyixiong]

I'm not impressed.  His speakers are tiny.

..and his spacebar is shiny.

(Hey it rhymes)

[J888www]

You can also upgrade your current GPU to a ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series.
Eyefinity
Currently the ATI Radeon HD 5850 is probably best value for money.

[cb951303]

I never kept using Awesome because I'm too lazy but I always liked and appreciated the fact that it's the only WM that uses XCB instead of Xlib.

[itlnstln]

I don't need to use it.  I'm already awesome.

[ch_123]

Reminds me of this wonderful thread -

Link

It's a real stupid name too. When I google for awesome every thing under the sun shows up with the word awesome in it that has nothing to do with this program. It's very difficult to find help.

[dusanx]

I reinstalled Arch earlier on, and I'm giving it a try. If I don't like it, I'll move to Openbox. That said, I'm finding it quite good so far, but it does take some getting used to given how different it is.

Awesome is not bad but they change config file too much. I am using DWM. Arch is great distro, using it. Urxvt (even better rxvt-unicode-256color from community) has a lot of adventages. One of them is quazi-transparency, great to use with any tiling WM.

DWM is easy to setup, you can both try it and keep awesome on arch. If you are not using awesome widgets that is.

[ch_123]

openbox is a window manager.
i use openbox ON arch.

I am aware of all this. What made you think otherwise?

[AndrewZorn]

i guess i confused what "it" referred to
reading your sentence could be interpreted as you trying Arch now that you have installed it... but i guess now you meant awesome.
I reinstalled Arch earlier on, and I'm giving it a try. If I don't like it, I'll move to Openbox. That said, I'm finding it quite good so far, but it does take some getting used to given how different it is.
didnt mean to suggest you were stupid but even i have confused window managers with 'desktops' with distributions etc

[ch_123]

Yeah, I guess what I was saying was a bit ambiguous. In that instance I was in fact referring to Awesome.

[HaaTa]

Awesome is not bad but they change config file too much. I am using DWM. Arch is great distro, using it. Urxvt (even better rxvt-unicode-256color from community) has a lot of adventages. One of them is quazi-transparency, great to use with any tiling WM.

DWM is easy to setup, you can both try it and keep awesome on arch. If you are not using awesome widgets that is.

Did the WMII/DWM guys (last time I read the mailing list they were in the middle of a holy war, something to do with the websites I think, but that was a while ago) ever add the ability to change the tile size without the mouse?

Also, can urxvt set transparency to each individual color (ie. black is transparent but white is not)?

Oh and for anyone looking to use multiple graphics cards for multi-monitor. Try to stay with the same manufacturer (e.g. only ATi or only Nvidia). It will save you a lot of headaches.
Unless your running WinXP then you can go ape**** (well since I last checked, 2005). Linux is very very annoying as they reimplement libgl if you are trying to use binary drivers.

[dusanx]

Did the WMII/DWM guys (last time I read the mailing list they were in the middle of a holy war, something to do with the websites I think, but that was a while ago) ever add the ability to change the tile size without the mouse?

DWM only has title is in its status line, do you mean status line font size or something else? DWM does not have title bars.
Edit: Ouch, too early. You are asking about tile and I read title. Ok, tile size is managed by keyboard shortcuts in DWM, don't know about WMII.

Also, can urxvt set transparency to each individual color (ie. black is transparent but white is not)?

No, I don't think so. You can only set transparency for terminal background color.  This is what I have in my .Xdefaults:

urxvt.transparent: true
urxvt.tintColor:   black
urxvt.shading:     80
urxvt.fading:      20

You can set any color to be used for shading math but that works as replace background color with tint color and apply shading to wallpaper. Shading=80 is 80% transparency. Fading is applied to non-focused terminals, they additionally fade with the background and that helps to spot focused terminal immediately.

Urxvt also has good xft font handling and you can set almost anything, here is my font line:
URxvt.font:        xft:Monospace:pixelsize=12:antialias=true:hinting=true

[HaaTa]

No, I don't think so. You can only set transparency for terminal background color.  This is what I have in my .Xdefaults:

urxvt.transparent: true
urxvt.tintColor:   black
urxvt.shading:     80
urxvt.fading:      20

You can set any color to be used for shading math but that works as replace background color with tint color and apply shading to wallpaper. Shading=80 is 80% transparency. Fading is applied to non-focused terminals, they additionally fade with the background and that helps to spot focused terminal immediately.

I was just asking because I found code handles for fine grain transparency control while I was ripping apart Konsole/qtermwidget.

Yeah, urxvt definitely got me on the transparency bandwagon. I eventually went for true transparency with xcompmgr (which doesn't crash so much anymore).

Tinting is something I need to add to my own terminal. But I'm currently more interested in my OpenGL frontend atm (figuring out font rendering atm, it'll probably precache the fonts as SVG so the fine grained scaling looks like new ass rather that old ass). Currently skiing takes priority so no time estimate on either.

The latest version of Qt introduced some bugs with daemon mode but, I do have an PKGBUILD on AUR.

[dusanx]

Tinting is something I need to add to my own terminal. But I'm currently more interested in my OpenGL frontend atm (figuring out font rendering atm, it'll probably precache the fonts as SVG so the fine grained scaling looks like new ass rather that old ass). Currently skiing takes priority so no time estimate on either.

The latest version of Qt introduced some bugs with daemon mode but, I do have an PKGBUILD on AUR.

Hey nice, I might try it. I am very much GTK oriented and KDE (along with QT) never felt right for me. The only reason why I have QT installed is because VirtualBox front end needs it and there is no proper GTK VB substitute.

[HaaTa]

Oh, a big plus for Awesome WM is that it uses CMake rather than autotools (better known as autohell/autocrap/autoslow/autopainintheass/etc/etc).

Which for the layman, has pretty colours by default and percentage completion.

But most of you probably uses the packaged version anyways...

[Superfluous Parentheses]

I'm using xmonad at the moment, even though I really prefer ION - long story short: xmonad works better with the bleeding-edge nouveau (nvidia) drivers, while ION3 has completely dropped even xinerama support - and I run 2 monitors.

But the concept of tiled/tabbed window managers is sound. Much better than dragging stuff all over the place like I have to do when working on my macbook.

[ch_123]

I tried ION once and liked it, but the guy who wrote it is apparently a complete douche, and is supposedly planning on dropping support for it.

[Superfluous Parentheses]

I tried ION once and liked it, but the guy who wrote it is apparently a complete douche, and is supposedly planning on dropping support for it.

Well, yes. I'm planning on configuring xmonad to behave more like ION, it looks like that's fairly straightforward, but I haven't had to the time to figure out all the stuff - the documentation is a bit lacking and I'm not nearly proficient enough in Haskell to easily read the source code.

[dusanx]

Well, yes. I'm planning on configuring xmonad to behave more like ION, it looks like that's fairly straightforward, but I haven't had to the time to figure out all the stuff - the documentation is a bit lacking and I'm not nearly proficient enough in Haskell to easily read the source code.

This one? http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Tabbed.html

It is easy to add if you don't try to understand syntax lol.

I was using xmonad before I switched to dwm. It is almost as good as dwm but I did not liked lack of any status bar out of the box and huge ghc dependency. 60MB download and 560MB on disk is too much for lightweight WM.

[elservo]

This is definitely not true, completely depends on what you are doing.

Also that guy likes IRC.

Yeah I was about to say that he spends more than a reasonable amount of time on IRC.

I remember that back in the day I'd open up a bunch of Mirc windows to look l337 when taking screenshots.

[pikapika]

i wanted to try xmonad, but haskell is quite hard for a non developper, lua is easier

about irc, i do also spend too much time on it  :-)
some irc users here ?

[HaaTa]

Occasionally I spend time on IRC, but I've been much to busy as of late (too lazy to go around all the proxy crap they have at work, and they wouldn't like it so much).

[Superfluous Parentheses]

This one? http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Tabbed.html

It is easy to add if you don't try to understand syntax lol.

I was using xmonad before I switched to dwm. It is almost as good as dwm but I did not liked lack of any status bar out of the box and huge ghc dependency. 60MB download and 560MB on disk is too much for lightweight WM.

Ok, but does DWM do tabs? I've got GHC installed anyway.

[pikapika]

afaik dwm does not do tabs, that's why i switched from ion to awesome

[dusanx]

I am not sure, kind of remember that DWM had some patch to do tabs but quick search did not find anything. I did not used tabs while I was using xmonad so it was easy switch for me.

If you use ghc it makes much more sense to have xmonad installed, true.