Awesome WM configuration

Today I started to use Awesome on my desktop in the office. I've been using it for 3 months during my internship at Google and it was awesome! It requires a little bit of configuration at the beginning.

To make Awesome appear as a choice of WMs in the Ubuntu login screen, delete "NoDisplay=true" in /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop. Apparently this is a bug in Ubuntu.

To create a user configuration file, copy the default one to the ~/.config folder:

$cd ~
$mkdir -p .config/awesome
$cp -r /etc/xdg/awesome/* .config/awesome

Note that there are some other files under /etc/xdg/awesome besides rc.lua, and you need to copy all the files. Otherwise there will be errors and the user configuration will be ignored (I tripped over this).

Configure screen locking
Install xscreensaver. Add the following lines to rc.lua.

# In globalkeys = ...
awful.key({ modkey }, "F12", function() awful.util.spawn("xscreensaver-command -lock") end)
# At the end of the file:
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("xscreensaver -no-splash")

Shortcuts

• Close dialog windows: meta+shift+c