The Awesome WM is awesome

Often, it is described as "tiling WM for beginners". But inside it is powerful enough — it uses Lua scripting language inside it's configuration file. In the same manner, like StumpWM uses Common Lisp inside it's configuration file. So almost everything, almost any action, could be programmed with Lua.

Looks like Lua is simple enough — with the help of language manual I recreated my StumpWM configuration in one evening. And much more:

- Main (task) bar on the left.
- Widgets with menus: "wifi widget" with menu to call wpa_gui or call dhclient for some interfaces. And the battery widget with menu to setup the charging threshold.
- SVG icons (from Haiku) almost everywhere — in menus, in main bar, etc.

#AwesomeWM #Lua

Alt...

Clear desktop with wallpaper (Adine from "Angels with scaly wings") and the main panel on the left. On the panel, from top to bottom: 1) Iconified list of workspaces. Red kettle for workspace with Emacs, XTerm, etc. Globe for workspace with Librewolf or Dillo. Video tape icon for workspace with Librewolf's "Picture in Picture" window and for mpv windows.. And the desk icon for VNC client. 2) Vertical list of opened windows on the current workspace. 3) State of "wlan0" interface — the SSID of current WiFi network. It has the yellow background and the icon of the radio tower on the left. 4) Battery state — the battery percentage. It has the purple background and the icon of the battery on the left. 5) The current week day and the date. The calendar opens by click in this area. 6) The current time.

Alt...

The Emacs window opened in the Awesome WM. The main bar are on the left.

Alt...

The Emacs window in the Awesome WM. On the left bar, the battery and WiFi widget were clicked, so they display the extended information. The WiFi widget displays not only the SSID, but also the used frequency and SNR (in dB). The battery widget displays the state of battery and used power (currently it is zero because battery neither charging, not discharging). The battery widget has the "right-click" menu opened. There are two items in this menu: to set charging threshold to the 80% and to the 100%.

#SilverBullet is becoming more and more of a fully featured programming platform.

It already had its own programming language (Space #Lua) for a while. Infrastructure wise there is a data store (with query language), event bus, message queue and I’m currently designing a service discovery and invocation system, as well as a package manager.

Things have escalated slightly from “hey, let’s build a little notes app.”

- switching between #Zig versions, I liked it more than the dedicated anyzig
- #Python venv activation – it's silly but feels so good, and collaborates with uv
- ensuring I have the right language server and formatter for a project, be it #Lua, #TypeScript, and trying out various options for Python
- setting LANG="C.UTF-8" only in the specific project folder because #Ansible refused to work with Polish...

The final boss was getting a really comfortable Tree-sitter setup: get the #Rust CLI, write grammar in #JavaScript, re-generate and run tests on source change as a mise Task. And then I only cloned the repo on another machine and was ready to go!

This post was written as a more cultured outlet for my excitement instead of aggresively committing mise.toml into every repository I touch

This is what #FOSS promises to be, and it does feel nice to actually do it.