AwesomeWM II
I just switched back to AwesomeWM. I used AwesomeWM from 2012 to 2017, so this almost feels like a relief.
I won’t bore you with my sordid window manager history and will instead cut to the chase: a couple of months ago NOAA changed how they store weather data. That broke the weather widget I was using. At the time I hacked around it but I figured the hack would break eventually, given how precarious it was at the time.
The hack broke Friday of last week. I looked into a couple options to fix it but was annoyed to have to fix something after only eight weeks.
On the other hand Rob Hoelz joined my team at ZR in February; he’s an AwesomeWM user and reassured me that the stability issues I complained about before had been mostly resolved. Armed with both that and the ability to ask him (and Meredith, who also knows Lua pretty well) I decided I’d try to migrate back to AwesomeWM.
I spent probably something like six hours, off and on, getting AwesomeWM set up to match my current XMonad setup, in addition to recovering some of the AwesomeWM features from before. The only thing I couldn’t do was make the AwesomeWM multihead support work the way it does in XMonad. I mentioned in both of my previous posts that I really appreciate the interface but the code is a little beyond me.
Thanks to Rob and Meredith I was able to get sharetags, the XMonad-like multihead support to compile and actually function. It’s a fork of a fork, and I don’t intend to be the long term maintainer, but it works for me and might work for others. I spent most of my lunch time getting it to work.
Anyway, it’s pretty amazing how much easier things are when friends are happy to help. I am confident I could have gotten help from the AwesomeWM community too, but that would have meant getting on IRC, figuring out how to ask, etc etc.
(The following includes affiliate links.)
If you want to try your hand at configuring or using AwesomeWM, you could get
Programming in Lua
Apropos of nothing, I’m just starting the final book in
Malazan Book of the Fallen
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