Awesome: learning to use a tiled window manager

Awesome is a great, highly configurable and extremely lightweight window manager for X. There are many chances for you to find it already packaged for you distribution.
Awesome is a "tiled window manager" even if it has also a "float windows mode". Anyway in its default settings you won't find the actual windows titles and their usual functions because the windows are placed automatically for the best use of the screen. In this mode you will have a graphical interface you can master completely using nothing more than your keyboard.

In order to achieve any sort of "productivity" with Awesome the user has to get used to it and to configure himself some keybindings and functions, since the defaults settings don't cover everything (and this was intended in order to put the stress on customization).

In the coming posts I will explain the results of my usability experiments with this "awesome" window manager ;-)

At first I had to recreate my custom configuration copying the default rc.lua file to ~/.config/awesome/

There I put also the copy of the default theme folder with the themes I wanted to use. So in the end I had this directory structure:
~/.config/awesome/themes/default (with all its files and subfolders)
~/.config/awesome/themes/sky (my chosen theme with all its files and subfolders)

Then I started the customization and I fixed the Java non-reparenting-wm issue. This problem caused alla Java GUI windows not to be drawn correctly leaving them blank and therefore rendering useless their applications (like MATLAB... which GUI is written in Java too).

In the coming days I will try to explain better the steps that led to my present configuration.

I you like, you can have already a look on my configuration files at this page on the webpage I use as file download support for this blog:

http://remmir.ath.cx/awesome

Keep on hacking! ;-)