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    Fri, 05 Dec 2008

    /Linux/Awesome: Introduction to the "Awesome" Window Manager

    I recently made the switch to Awesome mainly because of some ongoing pain in my right arm, which I am attributing to "mouse abuse". So I installed Awesome, which promises to be keyboard-centric rather then mouse-centric, and unplugged my mouse.

    A few days later, so far so good, with some reservations. I certainly do use the mouse less, as the Awesome keyboard shortcuts do make it very convenient to jump around between windows / applications. A bonus feature is more efficient use of screen real estate, as Awesome by default does not have window title bars, and its automatic window layouts are oriented toward displaying all windows at the same time, side-by-side. Though where appropriate, for some applications, you can choose to stack windows on top of one another, and you do get to choose which windows display together. And for many applications, I find myself using them now full-screen all the time, in their own workspace, without a title bar. Firefox, for instance, really seems to display a lot more on one screen (my laptop LCD is a smallish 1024x768).

    Reservations?

    I still use my laptop stick-mouse more then I would like. For certain activities with certain kinds of applications (browsing on a web browser, for instance) there is no way to get away from the mouse. At least I have not found one. For the part of your day you spend dealing with text, though (programming in terminals? writing this blog?) Awesome can almost completely eliminate mouse use.

    Awesome, by default, heavily depends on using the "Windows" key found on many keyboards. My Thinkpad X24 does not have one. The commonly made suggestion is to let the "Alt" key take-over this duty, my changing all instances of "Mod4" to "Mod1" in ~/.awesomerc. It works, but.... many common tabbed apps like Firefox are setup to use Alt-n to switch between tabs. Since Awesome has taken over the Alt key, I must use the MOUSE now to switch between tabs. Yuck.

    posted at: 04:22 | path: /Linux/Awesome | permanent link to this entry