NEWS

<a name="v44"></a>

DRAFT Awesome window manager framework version 4.4 changes DRAFT

This is work in progress and describes the current state.

Some general text about Awesome v4.4 should be here. Hopefully someone will notice that it is not yet here before we release...

This document was last updated at commit v4.3-197-g9085ed631.

New features

• mousegrabber can now take nil as a cursor to not change the cursor at all.
• awful.screen now has a request::wallpaper and a request::desktop_decoration signal. They make some workflow implementation cleaner.
• Lua code can interact with the selection contents via the new selection.acquire, selection.getter, and selection.watcher objects
• Pending delayed calls (gears.timer.delayed_call) can be dispatched via gears.timer.run_delayed_calls_now()
• naughty was rewritten TODO TODO say more about this TODO TODO
• The rules argument in awful.spawn.once and .single_instance is now optional
• The wibox.container.background now has a border_strategy property to define how the content is resized when a border is present.
• The wibox.container.margin now allows tables in the margins property.
• The declarative widget syntax now allows to directly use functions instead of {widget = myfunction}.
• The awful.widget.tasklist now resizes the client icons properly.
• The awful.widget.tasklist and awful.widget.taglist will now set the client and tag properly respectively on each widget of the template automatically. This reduces the amount of boilerplate code.

Noteworthy fixes

• $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is honored in more places when generating the documentation
• Fix setting shapes via awful.rules
• Set _NET_WM_DESKTOP for sticky windows correctly
• Under complicated circumstances, AwesomeWM could have run Lua code while having the X11 server grabbed. This had the potential to cause deadlocks with Lua code using io.popen. Usage of io.popen is still strongly discouraged.
• wibox{ input_passthrough = true } now works correctly. Previously, the property could only be set on already-constructed wiboxes.
• Remove unused first parameter from multiple widget constructors: wibox.container.place, * wibox.container.radialprogressbar, wibox.layout.stack, wibox.widget.slider.
• Renamed some properties like wibox.widget.textbox.align to wibox.widget.textbox.halign for consistency reasons.

Behavior changes

• wibox.container.background applies shapes differently. The new approach should be more consistent with a border.
• The shape_clip option of wibox.container.background was removed. The code now always behaves as if this option is set to true. The old behaviour can be simulated with wibox.layout.stack.
• Awesome now initialises Lua's random number generator from a good source
• naughty.dbus now uses Gio for talking to DBus. This is a first step in the deprecation of Awesome's own DBus bindings and could lead to behaviour changes on DBus.
• The client keys and buttons property now return awful.key and awful.buttons objects rather than the lower level key and button objects. If you used these low level APIs to add keys and buttons dynamically, please migrate your code to the corresponding :append_ and :remove_ client methods.
• beautiful.border_width and beautiful.border_color are now honored even when the part related to borders is removed from rc.lua. Set them appropriately in your theme or disconnect the default request::border handler.
• The order by which the client rules compute the geometry have changed slightly. The border is now applied before the titlebar offset. This should not affect most users unless you had mitigated the bug it fixes by adding the titlebar offset in your rules.
• Setting awful.rules.rules now append the rules to the existing set. Clearing the rules was never officially supported. If you really want the old behavior, use awful.rules.rules = {}; awful.rules.rules = my_new_rules.
• client:relative_move() now default nil values to zero. The previous behavior made no sense.
• The tasklist and taglist widgets are no longer directly an instance of it's main layout. Use the base_layout property to access the layout. This allows to replace the layout at runtime. The previous behavior was undocumented.
• Pango 1.44 is now the oldest recommended Pango version. Older versions are still supported, but will lack the ability to use some textbox properties, mainly wibox.widget.textbox.line_spacing_factor.
• The wibox.layout.grid layout expand, spacing and homogeneous property getters now return a table instead of a number. The table contains a horizontal and a vertical key.

<a name="v43"></a>

Awesome window manager framework version 4.3 changes

Awesome v4.3 is the third release of the 4.x API. It comes after one and a half years of little fixes and improvements. Awesome v4.2 was very stable thanks to everybody's effort to unit test everything. Given no major bug warranted a new release, this one adds a few large features while preserving full compatibility with existing user configurations.

New features

• gears.string now has a endswith and startswith functions
• luarocks modules are now automatically available in Awesome
• A generic way to create or use widgets has been added (wibox.widget.base.make_widget_from_value)
• It is now possible to connect to signals from all instances of a widget at once
• The calendar widget now supports margins
• The documentation has a new theme
• Wiboxes now have to_widget() and save_to_svg() methods.
• The client objects now have a immobilized_horizontal and immobilized_vertical property to know if they can currently be moved or resized (for example, it is set to false when maximized)
• gears.timer objects now have a call_now method.
• The hotkey popup now supports termite keybindings
• The menubar loads faster
• Wiboxes have an input_passthrough property to send mouse clicks to the object below.
• The taglist and tasklist now support the declarative constructor syntax
• There is now an awesome.pixbuf_to_surface to convert a GdkPixbuf to a cairo surface.
• The notifications icon can now be resized and limited with notification\_icon_\size
• A gears.sort module has been added with graph resolution
• awesome-client now runs code in a protected context
• The <a href="./03-declarative-layout.md.html">widget documentation</a> has been extended to be more friendly to new users.
• There is a new beautiful.maximized_hide_border theme option to hide the border for maximized clients.
• The client startup_id field is now writable. This is useful when the client native implementation is not present or too buggy to be used.
• The awful.widget.prompt now has a with_shell option to allow Bash/ZSH aliases, function and environment variables to be used in commands.
• The awful.titlebars now have a fallback_name when a client has no name property.
• Clients now have a motif_wm_hints property to reflect some hints using the Motif X11 property extension. This is used by some modern toolkits including GTK.
• Clients now have a requests_no_titlebar property to expose when a client has client side titlebars (also known as decorations and CSD)
• The hotkey popup now has a show_awesome_keys option.
• The awful.widget.prompt now has more of the awful.prompt constructor arguments.
• It is now possible to set a list of layouts per tag instead of a single global one.
• There is now a awful.layout.get_tag_layout_index() function to get the index of the current layout in the global layout list (awful.layout.layouts)
• The wibox.layout.manual layout now has an :insert() method.

Better DPI handling

The screen now has a read/write dpi property and awful.screen.set_auto_dpi_enabled(true) can be used to automatically set the DPI for many Awesome elements. Please note that it is not backward compatible and breaks many widget. As AwesomeWM always used pixels as the de-facto metric for sizes, enabling auto_dpi will break most existing configs. However, for people who use such setup, it might be worth speding some time to fix their config.

Extendable awful.rules providers and better awful.spawn functions

There is two new functions called awful.rules.add_rule_source and awful.rules.remove_rule_source. They allow to create a dependency graph for where a rule comes from and which provider has the priority when setting it.

Previously, there were the normal properties, awful.rules.high_priority_properties and awful.rules.delayed_properties. This didn't scale and could not represent all corner cases. Those table still exist and are still honored, but there is now a system that can handle the full complexity of the property priority graph.

This is used by default in awful.spawn. The reliability of attaching properties to spawn calls has been improved. On top of this, three new functions were added

• awful.spawn.once
• awful.spawn.single_instance
• awful.spawn.raise_or_spawn

They allow to specify that a command should only have one running instance. This works across restart too, so all hacks to handle restarting Awesome are no longer required.

Note that the client.startup_id isn't supported by all applications and a Linux-specific workaround is recommended to improve the reliability of the awful.spawn functions.

A brand new keygrabber API

The keygrabber module API was rebuilt from scratch to make it more usable. The previous API was very low level, very close to how it actually work, but was disconnected from how keygrabbers are used in a window manager. Getting anything done with the previous API required a lot of boilerplate code and had many corner cases to handle. The new API has built-in support for the most common use cases and is fully declarative.

A new GTK color palette based theme

A new theme has been added. It reads the GTK theme colors and use them in the wibar, menu and titlebar. It helps create an uniform look and feel between the window manager and client applications with minimal efforts.

Widgets improvements

The following widgets have been added:

It is now possible to set spacing widgets for all layouts:

The awful.widget.taglist and awful.widget.tasklist now support creating custom widgets for each elements:

A new popup widget allows to bypass most of the boilerplate code and easily display widgets on the screen:

The awful.widget.layoutlist allows to easily display and select the client layout from a widget:

Noteworthy fixes

• There is no longer an error when a tag defined by name in awful.rules is not found.
• The menubar is now generally more robust thanks to a variety of improvements
• Many dead links in the documentation have been fixed
• The textclock is now generally more robust with formatting issues, timezones and declarative constructors.
• The last screen is never removed. Previously, some laptops removed all screens during suspend, causing all clients to go to the first tag or getting lost completely.
• The new default rc.lua uses request::activate to set the focus. This fixes many corner case such as unfocusable clients getting the focus.
• Calling awful.spawn with a set of properties is now more reliable.
• awful.key.execute is now much more reliable.

Behavior changes

• Previously, when accessing a screen by RandR output name caused a Lua error when no output with the given name exists. This was changed to now return nil instead. This could break code that uses pcall to check if a screen exists. This code now needs to be changed to check for a nil return instead. In practice it is unlikely anyone will notice the difference.
• In the previous release, unfocusable clients might also not be raised. It was decided that this is a bug and the default behavior was changed.

<a name="v42"></a>

Awesome window manager framework version 4.2 changes

Awesome v4.2 is the second release of the 4.x API. It mostly fixes the bugs reported over the last 3 months and adds a couple widgets. Almost 150 issues have been resolved or decided to be obsolete.

Noteworthy fixes

• The annoying maximization regression from v4.1 has been fixed
• Fixes broken drag&drop with some applications like FlowBlade
• Changing the keyboard layout using xmodmap is now much faster
• Fixes a regression that prevents Awesome to start when the wallpaper is invalid
• The client history is now more reliable
• Another instance where clients ended up in the wrong screen has been fixed
• Awesome will no longer generate zombie processes when restarted
• All official themes now support HiDPI screens
• The magnifier layout has been fixed
• The menubar has been fixed for Lua 5.1 users

New features

• The hotkey popup has been extended to support Firefox, Qutebrowser and TMUX
• Naughty (the notification system) has a new ignore_suspend flag
• The textclock widget now supports timezones
• New utility functions have been added:
  • gears.string.split
  • gears.table.map
  • gears.filesystem.make_parent_directories
• New widget functions (moved out of the gears module):
  • wibox.widget.draw_to_cairo_context
  • wibox.widget.draw_to_svg_file
  • wibox.widget.draw_to_image_surface
• Maximization requests from clients can now be intercepted using a request::geometry signal handler.
• A new wibox.layout.manual layout has been added (see below)
• Two new calendar widgets have been added, a widget and a popup (see below)
• The ratio layout now supports various strategies to redistribute space
• The stack layout now supports offsets
• The notifications now have a naughty.destroy_all_notifications() function
• The xresources theme now supports the titlebar hover and press states

The stack layout offsets:

The ratio layout new full strategies:

The manual layout fixes a capability gap where hierarchical elements need to be placed manually. It has multiple modes including an awful.placement integration.

The new calendar widgets are very flexible and can be themed down to the very small details:

Behavior changes

• The client property::floating is now also emitted when the floating state changes implicitly, e.g. because the client gets maximized or fullscreened.
• Building Awesome from its root source directory is no longer supported and will print an error.

<a name="v41"></a>

Awesome window manager framework version 4.1 changes

Awesome v4.1 is the first stable release for the Awesome 4.0 API. It adds non-breaking new features and fixes bugs. The main purpose of the release is to provide stability while also adding features submitted by our contributors. This release contains about 350 commits by 35 contributors, including many new developers. Thanks a lot.

New features

The shape API has been extended to both client, notifications and wibox.

The prompt now supports syntax highlight and more advanced key hooks.

The prompt widget gained many new themes variables.

There is a new 2D grid layout with rowspan and colspan support.

There is a new awful.widget.only_on_screen container to make it easier to share wiboxes across multiple screens.

Various documentation improvements. Thanks for the feedbacks.

The awful.widget.taglist now has volatile theme variables.

There is now extra environment variables such as AWESOME_ICON_PATH and AWESOME_THEMES_PATH for those who prefer not installing Awesome.

Dynamic "C" Lua libraries are now detected like pure Lua ones.

gears.timer gained many new constructor arguments to make it easier to use.

Input shape mask are now supported. It is possible to create a wibox with passthough inputs.

There is a new awful.widget.clienticon widget capable of fetching icons of different sizes.

New theme variables

This release adds a ton of new theme variables to make Awesome prettier. We also thank all users who submitted screenshot.

theme.arcchart_thickness
theme.enable_spawn_cursor
theme.fullscreen_hide_border
theme.hotkeys_bg
theme.hotkeys_border_colo
theme.hotkeys_border_width
theme.hotkeys_description_font
theme.hotkeys_fg
theme.hotkeys_font
theme.hotkeys_group_margin
theme.hotkeys_label_bg
theme.hotkeys_label_fg
theme.hotkeys_modifiers_fg
theme.hotkeys_shape
theme.maximized_honor_padding
theme.notification_bg
theme.notification_border_color
theme.notification_border_width
theme.notification_fg
theme.notification_font
theme.notification_height
theme.notification_margin
theme.notification_opacity
theme.notification_shape
theme.notification_width
theme.prompt_bg_cursor
theme.prompt_bg
theme.prompt_fg_cursor
theme.prompt_fg
theme.prompt_font
theme.taglist_bg_volatile
theme.taglist_fg_volatile
theme.taglist_shape_border_color_volatile
theme.taglist_shape_border_width_volatile
theme.taglist_shape_volatile
theme.taglist_spacing
theme.tasklist_disable_icon
theme.tasklist_disable_task_name
theme.titlebar_close_button_focus_hover
theme.titlebar_close_button_focus_press
theme.titlebar_close_button_normal_hover
theme.titlebar_close_button_normal_press
theme.titlebar_floating_button_focus_active_hover
theme.titlebar_floating_button_focus_active_press
theme.titlebar_floating_button_focus_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_floating_button_focus_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_floating_button_normal_active_hover
theme.titlebar_floating_button_normal_active_press
theme.titlebar_floating_button_normal_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_floating_button_normal_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_focus_active_hover
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_focus_active_press
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_focus_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_focus_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_normal_active_hover
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_normal_active_press
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_normal_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_maximized_button_normal_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_minimize_button_focus_hover
theme.titlebar_minimize_button_focus_press
theme.titlebar_minimize_button_normal_hover
theme.titlebar_minimize_button_normal_press
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_focus_active_hover
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_focus_active_press
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_focus_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_focus_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_normal_active_hover
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_normal_active_press
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_normal_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_ontop_button_normal_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_focus_active_hover
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_focus_active_press
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_focus_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_focus_inactive_press
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_normal_active_hover
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_normal_active_press
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_normal_inactive_hover
theme.titlebar_sticky_button_normal_inactive_press
theme.wibar_bgimage
theme.wibar_bg
theme.wibar_border_color
theme.wibar_border_width
theme.wibar_cursor
theme.wibar_fg
theme.wibar_height
theme.wibar_ontop
theme.wibar_opacity
theme.wibar_shape
theme.wibar_stretch
theme.wibar_type
theme.wibar_width

Noteworthy fixes

• Some applications such as VLC and Terminator had large unpainted areas
• The magnifier layout has been fixed
• Un-maximization misbehaved
• Docking area is now per-tag again
• CMake missing dependencies detection is fixed
• Support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD have been restored.
• Dialog and transient window can be moved to other screens again
• The fallback mode (when Awesome fails to load rc.lua) is now more robust

Behavior changes

This is a stable release and we tried to minimize any upgrade impact. However various bugfixes induced minor, not noticeable, changes:

• HiDPI support fix changed the default theme "taglist square". This is only true if the original theme file is used (not a copy).
• Maximization now honor the screen padding. There is an option to restore the previous behavior.
• Un-maximized clients are now restored to their current screen instead of the screen where they were maximized.
• Hotkey popup no longer enable the Vim module by default due to user complaints

awful.util has been split into multiple modules in the gears library to reduce the dependency graph. This allows for better unit testing. awful.util will be deprecated in Awesome v5. For now, it is still safe to use it. However, new code should use the functions from gears instead of awful.util.

Other

• The minimal LGI version is now 0.8.0. It was found that Awesome 4.0 also had an issue in the menubar module when used with 0.7.3.
• GTK+3 is now required to run the integration tests.

<a name="v4"></a>

Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

Awesome 4.0 is the first release of the v4 API level, breaking the proven v3.5 API level after 4 years. This requires to port the existing user configuration and extensions to the new API.

This document offers an overview of the new features and required changes for existing users.

New features

Input

Mouse move and resize handlers

The code used to resize and move clients has been refactored to allow plugins to be attached. This includes:

• display the client geometry in the wibar
• implement a resize grid
• implement delayed resizing (like Windows 3.11 and TWM)
• have touch-friendly resize handles (implemented by the Collision extension)
• allow window snapping (implemented)
• allow edge tiling (like Windows 7+ (AeroSnap) , KDE and Gnome) (implemented)
• move to the next tag when dragged to the edge (like KDE3) (disabled by default)

See:

• mouse
• client request::geometry

.

Edge tiling (AeroSnap)

Clients are now resized when dragged to the screen edge similar to other window managers. The width of the border can be controlled by the beautiful.snap_border_width theme variable. The edge shape with beautiful.snap_shape (see gears.shape) and can be disabled by setting

awful.mouse.snap.edge_enabled = false

Edge snapping

While this was already supported, this feature has been extensively extended. It can be disabled by setting

awful.mouse.snap.client_enabled = false

Hotkey popup

It is now possible to display the list of active keyboard shortcuts by pressing mod4 + s (hotkeys_popup.show_help).

See:

• awful.hotkeys_popup
• awful.hotkeys_popup.keys
• awful.hotkeys_popup.keys.vim
• awful.hotkeys_popup.widget

New tag and layout properties

Generic useless gap

Adds an empty space between clients.

See:

• tag
• tag.gap
• tag.gap_single_client

Master fill policies

Allows the layout to optionally take all the space when there is no "slave" client or to use a smaller screen area. For example, if only one terminal is present in a awful.layout.suit.tile.left layout, then instead of filling the whole screen, it wont be larger than it would otherwise be if there were more clients.

See:

• tag
• tag.master_fill_policy

Volatile

Tags can now be volatile. A volatile tag will be destroyed when its last client has been untagged. This is useful for temporary layouts or tags dedicated to a single client.

See:

• tag.volatile

The corner layout

A new client layout with a larger master client and both a vertical and an horizontal row of slave clients.

New client properties

• client.focusable is now read/write (compared to read only in the previous versions)
• client.valid tells if the client still really exist or if the object is waiting to be deleted
• client.floating is now a client property
• client.x / client.y / client.width / client.height are client.geometry aliases
• client.first_tag is a convenience wrapper for c:tags()[1]

Client signaling

There is now an awesome.unix_signal signal table with all platform specific signals and their indices. There is also an awesome.kill() function to send signals to clients. This can be used, among other thing, to pause and resume clients.

New client rules (awful.rules)

All of the new client properties can be used in rules. In addition, the following ones have been added:

• placement: use the awful.placement method (or combinations) to place the client. While older version of Awesome allowed to use callbacks here, it didn't support all corner cases such as titlebar offsets and border_width.
• titlebars_enabled: older versions of Awesome had a global variable to enable or disable titlebars. This is now delegated to the rules.
• new_tag: allows to create a tag for the client instead of using an existing one.
• The tag property has been expanded to also find tags from their name.
• The tags property now tries to merge the current tags into the array to fix some other properties.
• All geometry properties are now executed at once to avoid side effects.
• The focus is now going through the focus filters instead of being applied as-is (see the focus filter section).

User rules

It is now possible to register new rules by adding them to some awful.rules arrays. This can be used by modules to add extra functionalities or to avoid boilerplate code in callbacks.

• awful.rules.high_priority_properties: before most other rules are executed.
• awful.rules.extra_properties: together with normal rules.
• awful.rules.delayed_properties: after most other rules, but before focus.

Those extra rules also have the capability to mutate the current rule array.

New widgets

Widgets

Containers

Layouts

Other widgets, like the taglist and tasklist, gained many new configuration features such as empty colors and shape.

See:

• <a href="./03-declarative-layout.md.html">The declarative layout system</a>
• awful.widget.tasklist
• awful.widget.taglist

New APIs

The new and streamlined property system

Previously some core objects, such as clients or tags, were static. It wasn't possible to directly set new properties on them. This is now supported:

c.my_new_property = "bar"

Also all properties previously accessible from the awful module are now directly accessible on the object:

-- Before
awful.client.floating.set(c, true)

-- Now
c.floating = true

See the "deprecated" section below for the list of functions that have been replaced by properties or methods.

The widgets API also received a similar overhaul. Both getters/setters and the property APIs are now supported.

-- Before
mytextbox:set_text("Foobar")
myimagebox:set_resize(not myimagebox:get_resize())

-- Now
mytextbox.text = "Foobar"
myimagebox.resize = not myimagebox.resize

Awesome 4.0 restores a feature found in older versions of Awesome. All widgets now have properties again. While all :set_foo(bar) type accessors are still fully (and forever) supported, it is now possible to do .foo = bar and obj.foo = not obj.foo . This is supported for all official widgets, containers and layouts.

Declarative widget syntax is supported again

Awesome 4.0 re-introduces the declarative widget syntax. This feature was lost when Awesome 3.5 introduced the new (and much, much better) widget system. It is possible to do it again.

See:

• <a href="./03-declarative-layout.md.html">The declarative layout system</a>

Most documentation examples have been adapted to use this syntax instead of the imperative one. Both syntaxes are fully supported.

For example:

-- Imperative
local l = wibox.layout.fized.horizontal()
local i = wibox.widget.imagebox()
local t = wibox.widget.textbox()

i:set_image("/path/to/awesomeness.png")
t:set_text("is awesome")

l:add(i)
l:add(t)

-- Declarative
local l = wibox.layout {
    {
        image  = "/path/to/awesomeness.png",
        widget = wibox.widget.imagebox
    }.
    {
        text   = "is awesome",
        widget = wibox.widget.textbox
    }.
    layout = wibox.layout.fized.horizontal
}

The request API

Awesome used to blindly allow requests from clients to steal focus or move them around. There are now handlers to block such requests. The request:: API is also used internally in Awesome itself to make previously hard-coded behavior more flexible.

• request::activate: When a client requests focus and/or being raised.
• request::geometry: When a client requests a position.
• request::screen: When a client needs a screen.
• request::select: When a tag wants to be selected.
• request::tag: When a client needs a tag.
• request::titlebars: When a client needs a titlebar.
• request::urgent: When a client requests attention.

See:

• awful.ewmh.tag
• awful.ewmh.geometry
• awful.ewmh.activate
• awful.ewmh.urgent
• awful.mouse.resize_handler

The defaults handlers are mostly located in the awful.ewmh module and comply with what the specification defines.

The placement API

While Awesome already had some basic placement function, the new API makes it possible to remove most hard-coded geometry handling code. From a user's point of view this API allows for rich floating window management using awful.rules.

It provides generic placement functions that work with:

• clients
• wiboxes
• the mouse
• anything with a :geometry() method

See:

• awful.placement

The shape API

This new API allows nicer visuals and more complex themes.

Also note that the client shape functionality was broken in 3.5 and has been fixed. See:

• gears.shape

The hierarchy API

The widget framework now produces a persistent model of its content rather than a volatile one during the wibox drawing. This allows for better introspection into the widget tree. This model is now exposed through the mouse::enter, mouse::press, mouse.current_widget and other APIs. This tree model also includes various matrices to convert positions from the screen coordinates to the one of the widgets (think of scaling and rotations).

This allows for interactive widgets such as a slider.

See:

• wibox.hierarchy
• <a href="./04-new-widgets.md.html">Creating new widget</a>

New themes

A new xresources theme has been added. It uses native X11 assets such as colors.

The default theme was improved with a more modern looking icon set.

Spawn and launcher improvements

Spawn

The newly renamed awful.spawn (previously awful.util.spawn) has been extended into a whole API. It is now possible to define rules directly through the spawn function. Note that this only works if the client properly supports the freedesktop.org startup notifications protocol. For example, to open a new urxvt in a new tag from the command line, use:

awesome-client  "require('awful.spawn')('urxvt', {new_tag=true})"

As another example, to launch a centered floating terminal in the currently selected tag of screen number 2:

awful.spawn("urxvt", {
    tag       = screen[2].selected_tag,
    placement = awful.placement.centered,
    floating  = true
})

See:

• awful.spawn
• awful.rules

All rule properties can be used, including the newly introduced placement ones (like above).

Launcher

awful.prompt gained many new features. One of them is the ability to add custom keyboard shortcuts and mutate the command. Paired with the new spawn features, it can be used to create mod4 + r shortcuts to spawn the clients with arguments and callbacks.

See:

• awful.prompt

Focus stealing filters.

It is now possible to add and manage filters to restrict what kind of focus stealing is allowed. It can be used to mute noisy applications or to implement tag level policies. Every way a client could claim focus, including those from within Awesome itself, now goes through the request filters.

See:

• awful.ewmh.add_activate_filter
• awful.ewmh.remove_activate_filter
• awful.ewmh.activate

Notification actions

Awesome now supports XDG notification (aka, naughty) actions.

See:

• naughty

Custom xproperties support

Awesome can now save some data in the X11 server itself. This allows to communicate with external applications or so save state across restarts.

There is also supported/used for persistent client properties.

Better XKB keyboard layout support

Awesome now has native support for keyboard layout detection and setting. Using setxkbmap to track the current layout is no longer necessary. This also includes a widget to view the current layout.

See:

• awesome.xkb_set_layout_group
• awesome.xkb_get_layout_group
• awesome.xkb_get_group_names
• wibox.widget.keyboardlayout

Other minor features

• awesome.composite_manager_running allows to detect if a compositor is running
• a new --replace command line option is available (similar to other window managers)
• clients now have an unified maximized property additionally to only _horizontal and _vertical
• awful.layout.layouts is now where the client layout array is stored
• the systray elements order can be reversed and spacing can be added
• it is now possible to get the layout of unselected tags (use with caution)
• tags can be swapped, former XMonad users with multiple screens can rejoice
• whole screens can now be swapped
• virtual screens can be created, moved and resized
• paths can be added to Lua's search path via the --search argument
• RandR 1.5 MONITOR support
• access to the X resource management database
• titlebars are now controlled using awful.rules and enabled by default
• awesome-client now supports Lua code as its first argument (instead of reading from stdin)
• preferred client icon size can now be configured (see awesome.set_preferred_icon_size)
• there is now an awesome.startup_errors string with the startup error (if any)
• Initial support for HiDPI monitors / different DPI per screen
• early support for stateful client layouts
• the --version command line option now provides more details and system information

Breaking changes

Awesome 4.0 is a major release. As with all other major release, the API was broken to accommodate for new capabilities. It isn't as different as 3.5 was from 3.4 however. Many changes now cause a deprecation warning instead of breaking hard. However, it is important to take note of these changes in order to avoid new bugs.

Also see the <a href="17-porting-tips.md.html#v4">tips for porting your configuration</a>.

There can be off-screen clients unless rc.lua is adapted

To fix from bash/zsh without a config change:

echo 'for _,c in ipairs(client.get()) do require("awful.placement").no_offscreen(c) end' | awesome-client

And add the following to the global rc.lua awful.rule section:

placement = awful.placement.no_overlap+awful.placement.no_offscreen

Also note that this is the new official syntax for placement functions in rules. It is recommended to remove existing ones that are used as callbacks and move them to the placement rule property.

See:

• awful.placement
• awful.placement.no_overlap
• awful.placement.no_offscreen
• awful.rules

Screens are no longer static

Replace rc.lua for s=1, screen.count() do with awful.screen.connect_for_each_screen(function(s) and add a ) after the section end. All global widget tables should be adapted to avoid memory leaks. Static code should not use screen.count() anymore. It should also always use the screen object, as the integer representation is mostly deprecated.

See:

• screen
• screen.connect_for_each_screen
• screen.disconnect_for_each_screen

Screens are now objects

Previously: type(s) == "number", now: type(s) == "screen". Doing screen[1].geometry is now partially deprecated and will probably print a warning in future versions. Any code comparing number and screen objects is now broken. Use screen objects instead of numbers.

See:

• screen

Awesome no longer restarts when a new screen is added

By default, rc.lua now handles screen changes without restarting. It allows to preserve the tag and layout state across changes. Old rc.lua can either be ported to handle this by taking clues from the new rc.lua or restore the old behavior by adding the following at the end:

screen.connect_signal("list", awesome.restart)

See:

• screen
• screen.list

Widgets' :fit() and :draw() methods signature changed and :layout() is mandatory for layouts and containers

All custom widgets need to change their function signature.

The "align" layout default behavior changes

There is a new "strategy" property to define how the space is distributed.

Many APIs are deprecated, fix them before they turn into errors

For example, instead of awful.tag.viewonly(t), the recommended API is now t:view_only(). The whole API has been standardized around this object oriented notation. The warnings will be printed on stderr.

Most widgets' private APIs have changed

You should not use undocumented APIs. Those can change at any time, and this is no exception. The private API of all widgets has been broken.

Spawn changes

• It has been moved into its own module (awful.spawn).
• Some methods have been deprecated. It is not recommended to use blocking methods in Awesome. We made sure to make your life harder if you wish to ignore this warning. Really, using blocking calls in rc.lua has very nasty side effects.

See:

• awful.spawn

Prompt changes

Most arguments have been deprecated, they are now taken from the args argument-by-name table. This was done because the number of optional arguments was getting out of control.

See:

• awful.prompt.run

Timers are no longer part of the C API

Use gears.timer.

Deprecated functions

The previous Awesome API mixed different conventions. There was a major undertaking in 4.0 to make the API coherent and well documented.

Those functions have been renamed or converted to methods:

• awful.client.jumpto
• awful.client.visible
• awful.client.tiled
• awful.client.moveresize
• awful.client.movetotag
• awful.client.toggletag
• awful.client.movetoscreen
• awful.client.mark
• awful.client.unmark
• awful.client.ismarked
• awful.client.togglemarked
• awful.client.floating.set
• awful.client.isfixed
• awful.client.floating.get
• awful.client.floating.toggle
• awful.client.dockable.get
• awful.client.dockable.set
• awful.client.property.get
• awful.client.property.set
• awful.client.get_transient_for_matching
• awful.client.is_transient_for
• awful.mouse.client_under_pointer
• awful.mouse.client.dragtotag.border
• awful.mouse.client.corner
• awful.screen.getdistance_sq
• awful.screen.padding
• awful.tag.move
• awful.tag.swap
• awful.tag.delete
• awful.tag.gettags
• awful.tag.setscreen
• awful.tag.getscreen
• awful.tag.selectedlist
• awful.tag.selected
• awful.tag.setmwfact
• awful.tag.getmwfact
• awful.tag.setlayout
• awful.tag.setvolatile
• awful.tag.getvolatile
• awful.tag.setgap
• awful.tag.getgap
• awful.tag.setmfpol
• awful.tag.getmfpol
• awful.tag.setnmaster
• awful.tag.getnmaster
• awful.tag.seticon
• awful.tag.geticon
• awful.tag.setncol
• awful.tag.getncol
• awful.tag.getidx
• awful.tag.viewonly
• awful.tag.getdata
• awful.tag.getproperty
• awful.tag.setproperty
• awful.tag.withcurrent
• awful.util.get_rectangle_in_direction
• awful.wibox.get_position
• awful.wibox.set_position
• awful.wibox.attach
• awful.wibox.align
• awful.wibox.stretch
• awful.widget.progressbar.set_vertical
• awful.widget.progressbar.set_height
• awful.widget.progressbar.set_width

Note that for 4.0, only a warning will be printed if these functions are used. They will eventually be removed.

Increased use of asynchronous programming

Many operations, such as re-draw, re-layout, geometry changes and various C API calls are now delayed to the end of the event loop iteration to avoid multiple changes per iteration (to not waste CPU time). The downside of this is that it is no longer reliable to assume the result of the previous line of code being applied in the next already.

Startup handling

There is no longer a "startup" argument to the client "manage" signal. If Awesome is currently starting up, then awesome.startup is set to true.

Renamed modules

Just as the functions above, many modules have been moved to follow a naming convention. Using the old name will print a warning and will alias into the new module. Note that theses aliases are temporary and will be removed.

• awful.wibox
• awful.widget.graph
• awful.widget.progressbar
• awful.widget.textclock
• wibox.layout.constraint
• wibox.layout.margin
• wibox.layout.mirror
• wibox.layout.rotate
• wibox.layout.scroll
• wibox.widget.background

The mouse finder module is gone

It has been broken for ages, so we concluded nobody cared.

Menubar changes

menubar.menu_gen.generate is now asynchronous and needs a callback as an argument.

Rules execution order changes

The order in which rules are executed changed. It has been manually curated to avoid known race conditions between the rules execution. For example, adding a titlebar after setting the position resulted in an unwanted shift proportional to the titlebar size.

This is regarded as a breaking changes since it impacts the behavior of existing code, hopefully for the better.

Other

New dependencies

Awesome now depends on Gio and a few other new packages since 3.5. See the README for an extensive list.

A new documentation

Awesome 4.0 now uses LDoc and MarkDown based documentation. We also introduced official guides into our documentation:

• <a href="./90-FAQ.md.html">FAQ</a>
• <a href="./02-contributing.md.html">Contributing</a>
• <a href="./03-declarative-layout.md.html">The declarative layout system</a>
• <a href="./04-new-widgets.md.html">Creating new widget</a>
• <a href="./05-awesomerc.md.html">Default configuration file documentation</a>
• <a href="./06-appearance.md.html">Change Awesome appearance</a>
• <a href="./16-using-cairo.md.html">Using Cairo and LGI</a>

The new documentation is vastly superior to the previous one and includes previously missing elements such as:

• a hundred images (from zero)
• more than a hundred new code examples, most of them unit tested (from very, very few)
• all signals (previously partially documented in the wiki)
• all theme variables
• the object properties
• references throughout the documentation
• variable types (previously mostly undocumented)
• many auto-generated pages instead of manually curated (and out of date) ones

The old wiki is closing down

We are moving to a 2 tier solution based on official (and curated) documentation, and a Git based wiki solution. The old wiki has been partially closed down for years due to spam issues and given the API breakage in the past, a non-negligible percentage of the content and tips were no longer working properly.

New website address

The official website is now https://awesomewm.org/ and is now hosted by GitHub. This will allow to retire the former server.

Awesome is now developed on GitHub

This isn't technically part of the release and has been true for years, but as the first major releases since the move, it is a good time to point out that we retired the old infrastructure. This includes the bug tracker, download, wiki, website, repository and continuous integration system.

This move increased our development velocity, number of contributor, visibility count and reduced our infrastructure maintenance cost.

Test-driven development

Awesome went from 0% to 75% unit test coverage. We now have 4 testing systems:

• Linting (checks the code quality and consistency)
• Unit testing
• Documentation examples, documentation images and user interface appearance tests
• Integration tests

We also have a test matrix for:

• Different Lua versions
• Different screen resolutions
• Installation paths
• Dependencies versions

Packaging support

Apart from the existing packages in distributions, Awesome users can now use "make package" to generate .deb or .rpm instead of using make install.