using GNOME with Awesome without die trying

I'm an avid GNOME user, but I don't want to give up tiling due to that.

After 1.5 years with xmonad+GNOME, I've decided it was about time to give Awesome another try. Last time I tried, integration with GNOME was really sub-optimal; in particular I've been it by the showstopping (for me) issue that it was not possible, back then, to disable Awesome systray in favor of GNOME's.

Nowadays, GNOME+Awesome integration is much better. It's very easy to disable all you don't want of Awesome (including systray) to rely upon corresponding GNOME desktop components (check my rc.lua for an example).

Still, by renouncing Wibox in favor of GNOME Panel, you (used to) lack some features: (1) the ability to monitor the current layout, (2) (GNOME) run application prompt, and (3) Lua code prompt. It is to overcome these limitations that I've hacked GNOME Awesome Applet.

Version 0.1.0 is now available for download from the homepage. It's beta-quality and it's the first (hopefully last?) GNOME Applet I've ever written, … you know the drill. Feedback, bug reports, features requests, and code patches are more than welcome.

Enjoy!

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Bluetile!

I was an Awesome user for a couple of years. Earlier this year, due to Joachim Breitner's posts, I found out about Bluetile - A tiling window manager which integrates perfectly with Gnome, and has close to no configuration. I know I had more power with Awesome - but I don't have to worry about Bluetile. It just limits to doing its work. And I love it!

Comment by Gunnar — Fri 26 Nov 2010 05:33:58 AM CET

gnome-shell?

would this integrate well into gnome-shell? I've been using that for ~a year now and I dont think I could go back to the regular gnome interface, but I am interested to play with tiling.

Comment by threethirty — Sat 27 Nov 2010 05:55:39 AM CET

re: gnome-shell?

would this integrate well into gnome-shell?

I've asked the very same question last week to a GNOME developer. Unfortunately, the answer is "no".

The reason (I've been told) is that ATM, GNOME shell does not allow to "delegate" window management to anything else than GNOME shell itself. In principle, I believe it would be very nice to delegate window management to a separate process, once within a specific GNOME shell workspace.

Unfortunately, until that is possible, you can't use GNOME shell with Awesome at all, ... let alone using GNOME Awesome Applet :-)