Tips for upgrading your configuration

From 3.5 to 4.0

The best advice is to start from the default rc.lua and backport any changes you might have added to your rc.lua. This avoids most of the possible errors due to missing important changes.

To do this, you can download the default rc.lua for 3.5.9 here, and then compare your existing rc.lua with the 3.5.9 default using your diff tool of choice. Write down the changes, then apply these to the 4.0 default rc.lua, which you can find at /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua after the upgrade, or here if you have not yet performed the upgrade.

If you still wish to ignore this advice, first read the NEWS section about the breaking changes. This document assumes you did.

Be warned, even if it looks like it’s working after changing some lines, it wont supports dynamic screen changes and will have many subtle bugs. The changes mentioned below are important for the stability of your window manager.

Here is a diff of the 3.5.9 rc.lua with the 4.0 one. All changes due to new features and new syntaxes have been removed. A – in front of the line correspond to content of the 3.5 rc.lua and + its replacement in 4.0.

This document does not cover the new features added in the Awesome 4 rc.lua, it only covers the minimal required changes to have a properly behaving config.

Awesome does not provide autostart functionality; not in the sense of freedesktop autostart specification and using *.desktop files. Below are some solutions for you to consider.

These advices can be useful to create a screen locker with slock and xautolock by simply adding xautolock -time 10 -locker slock to ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua

I've got it. There is a utility called xbkeys for setting accessibiltiy options for xorg.

From xbkey manual:

To switch sticky keys on or off, and optionally set or reset:
() two keys pressed at the same time stops sticky keys;
() a modifier pressed twice will be locked:

    [-]{sticky|st} [[-]twokey|[-]latchlock]...

I ran this:

$ xkbset sticky -twokey -latchlock

That command can go in .xinitrc

# turn on stickykeys. don't let two keys pressed at the same time disable it.
# don't turn on "latch lock", ie pressing a modifier key twice "locks" it on.
xkbset accessx sticky -twokey -latchlock

# don't expire these settings. (run xkbset q exp for details.)
xkbset exp 1 =accessx =sticky =twokey =latchlock

dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, originally designed for dwm. It manages large numbers of user-defined menu items efficiently.

The problem with lxdm (and slim) was that when started, it showed only a black screen and blocked for about a minute.

Un Window Manager pour les amoureux de la configurabilité et du minimaliste aux doigts sensibles. Après six mois sur i3wm en guise d'introduction aux "tiling window managers", la transition s'est faite de façon délicate lors d'un changement de système d'exploitation.