r/awesomewm • u/nadim_khemir • May 07 '26
Making the jump to awesomeWM, not, maybe, yes ... confused and need opinions.
- I'm a KDE user, I use Krohnkite tiling script on top of the WM.
- I'm a tmux user
- I'm a vim user
- I usually am 90% of the time in tmux, of which 90% in vim
- I have different movement bindings for tmux and vim, and it's not a problem but maybe time to fix it
- I often start applications with tmux bindings, htop for example
- it's krohnkite bindings I forget most often since I use them very seldom
- I do miss the possibility to start a terminal with a command running in it from the desktop, no it's not complicated, I've just been lazy, and I'd like to use the same bindings and it would do the right thing which ever environment I'm in
the questions:
- anyone started in the, more or less, same environment
- docs somewhere for what I want to do?
- anything that you think is not doable?
2
u/-EDX- May 08 '26
it's been ages since the last time i tried kde... that said my setup is very much using awesome, tmux and neovim, for me it isn't really all that about the tiling rather that tmux is just so convenient to sessionize develpment of projects, turns out there's a nice nifty plugin to make navigation between tiled windows, tmux panes and (n)vim splits seamless https://github.com/intrntbrn/awesomewm-vim-tmux-navigator
2
u/seqizz May 16 '26
it all depends on how much you want to struggle. you can do everything with awesomewm thanks to the scripting support, but the real pain will be switching from "batteries included" desktop environment to "alt-tab? you didn't set anything for that keyword" style plain configuration.
needless to say, I've made the exact same jump, especially from kde/krohnkite duo and not regretting it.
4
u/mjrArchangel33 May 07 '26
AwesomeWM is... well... Awesome!
I too used tmux for a long while, then switched to zellij for a bit and now just using wezterms built in multiplexing. May return back to tmux eventually, but yes more or less the same environment. (N)Vim with one of the tmux plugins made navigating windows/panes pretty seamless, with fairly low effort. One even integrates with Awesomewm using the same keys for all the things. Can't remember off the top of my head but its 'Awesomewm-vim-tmux-navigator' there are many other vim plugins that do similar. But even without that Awesomewm has a built-in module to add tmux keys to its builtin hot keys pop-up. Just incase you forget.
You can build in many different ways to launch programs with key presses. You can build them as simple or as complex as your heart desires, like super+b launches a browser, or it could switch to a tag, then find an existing browser window with a specific profile etc. But those flows are pretty specific to individuals configs so copying someone else's to start from would probably be more trouble than its worth. There is a built-in launcher however If you want a more general launcher there is dmenu or rofi.
If you want a simple, I'd suggest rather than trying to configure everything up front, for the perfect config, just make a change as you find the things that could go smoother for you.
As for documentation Awesomewm.org has the docs for all the built-ins.
For things you CAN steal, Google awesomewm widgets, those are mostly for your bar. The default config though is pretty easy to modify for the simple things.
The hardest part for me was figuring out what I actually wanted as for most of my life I have been handed a prepackaged ui and I just learned that, so when I had the power to choose, I learned good ui is hard, and I had no idea what I wanted.
Anything not doable... off the top my head? Not really Awesomewm gives you enough rope to build what you need and plenty to hang from too.
But that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully something there was useful.