Thanks to Ubuntu’s Unity

1. Very minimal, no clutter, tiny top panel that stays our of your way and maximises screen real state.
2. Large number of workspaces (a.k.a ‘tags’ in Awesome WM speak). The default is 9.
3. Very stable. Almost two years of daily use, and I don’t remember it crashing on me or having to restart it. One of the advantages or being minimalistic.
4. High performance (this WM is really minimal), switching between workspaces/windows with 0 lag; the desktop loads immediately after the login screen (because there’s not a lot to load really). No silly 3D effects. It is perfect for running on virtual machines.
5. Default keyboard shortcuts do not interfere with (my) Emacs key bindings thanks to Awesome using the Windows key as trigger.
6. Everything can be done from the keyboard. Jumping between workspaces, selecting windows (a.k.a ‘clients’ in Awesome WM speak), transferring windows to other workspaces (a.k.a. ‘tags’ in Awesome WM speak), switching between tile layouts, changing window positions and sizes, starting terminals and programs, closing windows, putting windows on top, maximising, minimising, etc.
7. No hassle installation in Debian derivatives with sudo apt-get install awesome.
8. Minimal/no configuration out of the box that gets things working from minute 0. Multiple screens work out of the box at least in Ubuntu.

1. Additional configuration/personalisation requires tinkering with Lua scripts, which I don’t mind since I don’t care about the looks of the desktop.
2. You need to memorise a basic subset of keyboard combinations from day 1. Not a problem if you are an avid Emacs user like me.
3. No volume widget. Keyboard multimedia keys do not work out of the box (more on that later).

I’m used to changing volume using the multimedia keys of my keyboard. There is no default configuration in Awesome to do this so it is necessary to add a bit code in Awesome’s rc.lua script to make it work. The following is an example on how to bind the multimedia keys to do this type of things:

awful.key({}, "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", function () awful.util.spawn("pactl -- set-sink-volume 1 +10%") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86AudioLowerVolume", function () awful.util.spawn("pactl -- set-sink-volume 1 -10%") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86AudioMute", function () awful.util.spawn("/home/joni/work/tools/bin/pa-vol.sh mute") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86Mail", function () awful.util.spawn("thunderbird") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86HomePage", function () awful.util.spawn("nautilus /home/joni") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86Messenger", function () awful.util.spawn("skype") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86Document", function () awful.util.spawn("libreoffice") end),
awful.key({}, "XF86Favorites", function () awful.util.spawn("firefox") end),

• Increasing/decreasing the volume is done with Pulseaudio’s pactl command line utility, that allows the control of a running Pulseaudio server.
• Muting with Pulseaudio is a bit more complicated, but I found a handy script that makes use of the same ~pactl~ utility in combination with padump to achieve the effect of muting and unmuting a specific Pulseaudio sink from the command line. Just needed to make sure that the script would use the right Pulseaduio sink for my system. pacmd list-sinks is one tool that can be used to list Pulseaudio sinks available in a system.
• I dont’ use other keys like play, stop, next or previous, but other people bind them to control MPD as a backend player.

Finally, there are those programs that you need to start every time you log in your system. So I decided to add those to the Awesome’s config to auto-start them on every session.

awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/usr/bin/radiotray")
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/usr/bin/hp-systray")
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/usr/bin/quicksynergy")
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/home/joni/bin/emacsorg")
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/home/joni/bin/emacstiz")
awful.util.spawn(terminal)
awful.util.spawn(terminal)
awful.util.spawn("/usr/bin/nautilus")
awful.util.spawn("/usr/bin/firefox")