I've been trying different configurations on awesome wm, but suddenly awesome stopped loading ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua on startup, and now only loads the default configuration at /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua.
I tried starting from scratch and copying the default to ~/.config/awesome, but that didn't seem to work. What can be causing awesome to stop loading my custom file? How do I even debug it? I tried awesome -k and it says everything's OK.
Best Answer
Ok, I figured it out. Debugged it using Xephyr.
Basically, I figured out that if there's an error in rc.lua, awesome rejects it and loads the default rc.lua from /etc/xdg/awesome. The trouble is, those errors don't often affect
awesome -k, which still shows "Syntax OK!". Debugging using Xephyr, though, while a pain to set up, allows you to see more verbose error messages and pinpoint the problem. For me, I was missing a command that rc.lua refers to, a compositor. Installing the compositor fixed the problem.