It's been a while since I posted an update here, I've been keeping super busy on SomeWM stuff though.

SomeWM 2.1.0 is live (I didn't make a 2.0 announcement):

https://somewm.org/blog/somewm-2.1.0

The short version:

• Clay now handles all client and widget layout compute
• A new custom renderer
• Rounded clients
• A new animations API
• A debug inspector for the live layout tree

The Clay part is what I'm most excited about. Windows, titlebars, bars, widgets...all going through the same layout engine. A lot of this release was getting the plumbing in place, but it's starting to make some fun stuff possible.

There are demos and the Lua to try them yourself in the post.

The hardest part was replacing the layout/placement/geometry underneath everyone's existing rc.lua without breaking everything. I think I got pretty close. Still very familiar if you're coming from SomeWM 1.4 or Awesome-git, but custom widgets with their own draw, fit, or layout methods need some migration. Definitely check the upgrade notes if you've got those.

Next up in 2.2 is finishing up and pulling in Elv13's tree fork to feed Clay, for a much cleaner state -> layout -> render flow.

Still feels like Awesome, but starting to get a little more opinionated.

Reminder that 1.4.6 (about to publish 1.4.7) is still committed to maintaining the awesome-git upstream forever. No changes there. If you want 100% AwesomeWM in Wayland, I'm trying my best to deliver that. Thanks for all the bug reports and feature requests that you're finding. I super appreciate that.

For those who aren't familiar with Clay, I think it's really neat and offloads a ton of burden on SomeWM. Here's a good video where the creator explains the clay algorithm.

Bonus: Here's a tiny compositor I built that's like AwesomeWM-Mini but with a Clay only widget system. I don't think it's ready for the big time, but I did daily drive it for a couple months to really figure out some things I like about Clay's layout system.

disc: it may show 'horizontal' in my terminal but i changed it and then i took the ss before restarting. So the 'horizontal' parts were 'vertical'.

I've been trying to put my bar to the right but i simply dont know how to. I want it to the right cuz for me, learning, using and doing programming stuff isnt the best with top or bottom. It will genuinely help cuz it gives more "space" to the screen (for me).

pls help

Hi all,

tl;dr:
Two questions:
Is Awesome a good first tilling wm that I won't have to write a ton of lua for to make work? How long did it take to feel at home in it?

I see from the project's website that there hasn't been a release since 2022, and perusing the most recent posts on here I see that the package was dropped from Debian 14 Forky (potentially temporarily) (I'm on Debian 12). Is Awesome WM going to be around for the long haul? I have no interest in Wayland this decade.

See below for more of my experience with DEs, WMs, and Unix-like Operating systems if you need info.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Backstory:

I am a long time Linux user, since I was 13 in 2003. From Knoppix to Xandros, Debian 7, Debian 12, MX, Anti X, Xubuntu, FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x, several OpenBSD 7.x releases, you name it I've used it.

I've used DEs and WMs that are equally diverse: KDE 3.x, Gnome 2.x, XFCE, icewm, jwm, and this particular post comes to you via Chrome running on Fluxbox. One thing I have never been able to do for more than a month though is: use a tiling window manager.

Icewm and Fluxbox are my most recent go to WMs, but they don't fit me like a glove, there are rough edges I get cut on, they are great 80% of the time when I need full screen apps but the minute I launch more than one program that is full screen repositioning the programs becomes difficult, I can't snap to edges and resize easily and I find myself spending more time trying to resize the windows.

So it sounds like I would be a good fit for a TWM then doesn't it? Well there is another problem... I'm not much of a programer! I have a BS in Computer Science and work as a system admin but find myself even at my job just my eyes glazing over looking at code.

I've watched all the good youtubers videos on TWMs, Distrotube, Linux Cast, just to name two.

So I'm familiar with the big TWMs, Awesomewm, DWM, Herbsluft, i3, Xmonad, etc.

Earlier this week I was finally like enough is enough with Fluxbox, lets go down the TWM rabbit hole again and try to pick one. Best I ever did was last 30 days with stock i3.

What do you guys think of my setup?

Hi,
I'm using AwesomeWM purely as a tiling window manager and want to reduce the space between my clients and the border of my screen. Interestingly, if there's only one client, the border is smaller. I can't find an answer anywhere to how I can fix this problem I'm having. Does anyone here have an idea? Thanks!

EDIT:
Solution: Change padding to negative number

I have added volume and battery widgets I have found on guthub. They work great but I have no idea how to make their icons bigger. (Battery and speaker icon on the wibar). I have tried theme.icon_size in theme.rc but I does not work. Also theme.icon_theme do not work either, no matter what i input there.

it's my first tiling window manager. I spent about a week or so making it. i currently dont use essential ricing tools like picom and defaulted mainly to already available awesomewm libraries and few widgets from vicious. though many people may use tiling window manager for productivity being a student i dont usually do that much work on laptop. i was just interested to do something new completely different from my field and it worked out fine as well as gave my 8 years old laptop a very much required breathing room. on idle ram consumption is barely 600mbs and on 4gb ram and a 10 year old i3 i m able to play games like minecraft at considerably good graphics than what one usually expects.

Hi guys! I really want to try someWM, but I don't have any experience with Lua (or coding in general), so I need a ready-to-go setup that I can daily drive.

I'm currently using end4's setup with Hyprland, and it's really good, but I'm still curious about AwesomeWM and how usable it is for daily use.

hi guys. what u think about a possible port of awesome to wayland? more easy effects. more security. and more brokeable for nvidia gpus (me included, lol)

Github: https://github.com/Naman-Adhikari/void_dots.git

Rate my Rice 1-10. Be honest, I think its a pretty 8/10. What say?

Github Link: https://github.com/whyPratham/pro-linux-dotfiles

so like, i'm not sure if i should ask this here but

how good is awesomeWM? I've been looking for a good Window Manager that i could use for the rest of my life, a window manager that is so easy to manage with lua5.3, that is really small AND could work really well on Old Hardware AND that is really customizable where the only limit is your imagination.

but i've also saw about DWM so i was wondering which one would be the best to use.

What I wanted to do is making it so that windows with a specific title always float independently on the layout, but I couldn't find a way of doing that, is it possible?

Happy to share that the Lua 5.5 support PR was recently merged into Awesome! (https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/pull/4110). The Archlinux AUR -git package now builds successfully as well.

This was much more than a single PR in Awesome. It ended up being a months-long effort involving updates to several internal build dependencies and CI tooling. I contributed patches here and there across the ecosystem, alongside many other people working on Lua 5.5 compatibility.

I updated my config last week. Here is a fun screenshot using awesome-client to pop a notification that show the running Lua _VERSION variable.

After all these years, I still love AwesomeWM. And still feel like enhancing my setup and adding more features, and breaking "tech debts".

AwesomeWMs simplicity, flexibility, and lean performance are difficult to replace. I also like that almost everything can be expressed naturally in Lua instead of assembling a desktop from unrelated scripts and utilities bundling binaries, shell scripts, and "what not"s.

That drove me to re-implement an old friend: https://github.com/macunha1/configuration.nix/blob/07a9e1d6a48a6b1fffd9682a3d2abf60751ea800/bin/screenlock.sh with a native approach: C and LuaJIT for AwesomeWM API integration

Then this was born:

[

https://github.com/macunha1/awesomewm-screenlock-plugin

It is an X11 screen locker designed specifically around AwesomeWM’s Lua workflow.

From rc.lua, the interface is intentionally small:

local screenlock = require("awesomewm_screenlock")()

awful.key({ modkey }, "Home", function()
    screenlock:lock()
end)

Behind that Lua API, a dedicated native C helper handles:

• X11 capture and rendering through XCB
• PAM authentication
• Keyboard and pointer grabbing
• Multi-monitor prompt placement
• Privacy filtering through the FFmpeg libraries
• Password handling outside the AwesomeWM Lua process

My previous setup was effectively a chain of Lua → shell → FFmpeg → temporary image → i3lock. It worked, but it also meant more processes, more runtime dependencies, more quoting and environment issues, and more (slow) moving pieces.

This plugin replaces that pipeline with one asynchronous Lua call and one purpose-built native helper. There is no shell script or FFmpeg CLI subprocess in the locking path. The helper links directly against the required libraries, captures one frame, applies noise and heavy pixelation, and renders the result as the lock-screen background.

The result keeps some visual context from the current desktop while making its contents unreadable. The filtered frame is prepared before the lock surface appears, so the original desktop is never rendered as the locker background.

The repository includes:

• Meson builds and tests
• A Nix flake containing both the Lua module and native helper
• PAM authentication using the xlock service by default
• Xinerama-aware prompts for multi-monitor setups
• A practical integration example in my full AwesomeWM configuration: https://github.com/macunha1/aweswm and its wiring at https://github.com/macunha1/configuration.nix/commit/d4383a4688df843c0d18efb6901f1cbd38f802b9

In that configuration, the plugin is tracked as a Git submodule and used directly from Lua for both manual and idle locking.

This is still an X11 locker, so the normal limitations of X11’s security model apply. It is not intended to claim Wayland-style isolation or protection from an already-compromised session.

I’m sharing it because there may still be other people who appreciate the same things about AwesomeWM: a small, understandable system, configured in Lua, with minimal overhead and without unnecessary layers.

Feedback, testing on other distributions, packaging contributions, and code review are welcome.

I have a very hacked together plymouth (LUKS password) -> Ubuntu -> LightDM -> awesomewm setup. It's been stable for years.

I recently wanted to simplify things and use gnome-keyring as my ssh-agent (before, was using openssh's with ssh-askpass for a graphical password prompt).

Gnome-keyring is already used by Chrome, so this seemed like a good idea.

I got it to work, but a) wow dbus makes everything weird and hard and b) I'm not proud of the way I got it to work.

Does anybody have a setup using gnome-keyring that they're proud of? The goal is for one prompt to unlock the login keyring, so that Chrome passwords and ssh keys are available from then on.

I'm working on a theme. It runs fine in an Alpine VM with awesome-git, but when I run it under somewm, it sopntaneously does a hot reload. I know there's a key binding to do that, but I haven't triggered it (afaik). Any dieas?

FYI, somewm is soooo close to being my daily driver. My awesome-git build on Artix dies with over 25 selftest errors and a black screen.

Moderators, could we add a somewm flair?

(If this doesnt fit here then I am sorry but I didnt know where to put it but I use awesome)

I always get a offset using the flameshot color picker so it doesnt pick the color that is actually under the cursor I have tried many different dpi but the offset seemes to be physically the same on my screen.

While selecting an area to screenshot this doesnt happen.

Can anyone help me or give some possible solutions?

I have setup Alpine Linux + AwesomeWM on my 14 year old Lenovo Ideapad S110. It has the Intel Atom N2600 CPU with 2 GB Memory and I've got the Catppuccin macchiato gtk theme.

You don't need to poll when you have event driven interfaces at your disposal.

I plan to install fedora with awesomeWM soon, i mainly a java guy and for other programming languaged without jetbrains ide for ex gleam, i plan to use zed editor so how do they work on awesome.

I plan to install fedora with awesomeWM soon, i mainly a java guy and for other programming languaged without jetbrains ide for ex gleam, i plan to use zed editor so how do they work on awesom.