Introducing Charitable: XMonad-like Tag Management for AwesomeWM

I am announcing a library for AwesomeWM that provides XMonad-like tag management.

I’ve written about AwesomeWM a few times now. It’s an X11 window manager mostly written in Lua and exclusively configured with Lua.

If you’ve used a window manager before you are probably familiiar with the idea of “virtual desktops.” The idea there is that you have a handful of windows on the desktop, and when you switch to a different virtual desktop, you can have a totally different set of windows shown. You can then switch back to the first virtual desktop and see the original windows in their original layout.

When you have multiple monitors this can get a little silly, swapping out all of the windows on all of your monitors. By default, AwesomeWM provides you a set of tags (which are like Virtual Desktops) per monitor. This means that you can swap sets of windows around, but by default they never go from one monitor to another without a deliberate action to move the windows that way.

XMonad has a different, and initially bewildering, way of working. Instead of a set of tags for each screen, it provides a single set of tags that are shared across all screens. Initially tag 1 will be on the first screen, tag 2 will be on the second screen, and so on. For the most part this works as one might expect, except when you try to switch to a tag on one screen that is already visible on another. If tag 1 is shown on screen 1 and tag 2 is shown on screen 2 and you attempt to show tag 2 on screen 1, XMonad will swap tag 1 and tag 2. This can be startling, but once you are used to it it can be both natural and incredibly useful.

A common way I use this is that if someone comes to lookat some code and sits next to me, I’ll show the tag that has the code visible on the screen closest to them. Instead of some kind of explicit window management commands, I just show the tag on that screen. It’s weird, but I love it.

In the original post I mentioned that there was a library (sharetags) to provide XMonad-like tag management, but that it needed some love. It has since been abandoned (twice!) such that it stopped working and needed love. I have updated the code so that it is now back to ship-shape, with help from Rob Hoelz, Meredith, and the AwesomeWM authors. Awesome.

Installation is a little weird, since the API reflects the older AwesomeWM APIs. Check out the charitable readme for how to do that. Hope this helps!

(The following includes affiliate links.)

If you want to try your hand at configuring or using AwesomeWM, you could get Programming in Lua , which is sortav the de facto reference.

Apropos of nothing, I’m just starting the final book in Malazan Book of the Fallen . It’s pretty great fantasy.

Posted Wed, Jun 5, 2019

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