Awesome is a highly configurable, tiling window manager initially based on dwm code. It is extremely fast, small, dynamic and ‘awesome’.
It manages windows in different layouts, like floating or tiled. Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed.
Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be waste on your screen. No gaps, no overlap.
awesome contains a small status bar which displays all available tags, the layout, the title of the focused window, and a status text. A floating window is indicated with an empty circle and a maximized floating window is indicated with a circle square before the windows title.
awesome provides a good environment for multi-screen (Xinerama) support.
This window manager is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control over the graphical environment.
Key Features
- Very stable, fast, small and simple.
- Multiple and per screen status bars, including a variety of widgets (text and icon boxes, graphs, progress bars etc).
- Uses the asynchronous XCB library instead of the old synchronous Xlib.
- No mouse needed: everything can be performed with keyboard.
- Real multihead support (XRandR, Xinerama or Zaphod mode).
- Implements many Freedesktop standards including EWMH, XDG Base Directory, XEmbed, System Tray.
- Real transparency support (using Composite extension and xcompmgr).
- Does not distinguish between layers: there is no floating or tiled layer.
- Layout handling: automatically manage your windows placement according to the chosen policy for each tag.
- Use tags instead of workspaces: allow to place clients on several tags, and display several tags at the same time.
- Lua extensions to add features: dynamic tagging, widget feeding, tabs.
- D-Bus support.
- Customized entirely through editing a configuration file.
- Each function for manipulating the environment is bindable to keys/ mouse buttons and executable remotely via a socket.
Website: awesomewm.org
Support: GitHub
Developer: Julien Danjou and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Awesome is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Dynamic Window Managers | |
|---|---|
| Xmonad | Minimalist, tiling window manager written in Haskell |
| dwm | Manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts |
| Qtile | Full-featured, hackable tiling window manager |
| spectrwm | Small dynamic tiling and reparenting window manager |
| LeftWM | Window manager for adventurers |
| awesome | Highly configurable, tiling window manager initially based on dwm code |
| wmii | Lightweight tabbed and tiled |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |