How to switch tags via awesome API

awesome

I've been digging around in the API documentation, and I'm having limited sucess
switching tags from within awesome-client. Basically, I can switch tags with:

awful.tag.viewidx(2)

But that is relative not absolute. From looking in my rc.lua, looks like what
I need is:

local screen = mouse.screen
awful.tag.viewonly(tags[screen][2])

But I get the following error instead:

attempt to index field '?' (a nil value)

What is the most concise way of changing tags (preferably one command) to an absolute tag number. Alternatively, how can I find the current tag?

Best Answer

After a lot of trial and error this is what I came up with:

awful.tag.viewonly(tags[1][3])

This will switch to the third tag.

Related Solutions

Scroll between tags in Awesome WM

Tags in awesome are not monolithic slates or work-spaces that could be "scrolled to". In general you have to re-think what you are looking at. Tags are not separately rendered spaces, they are lists of windows. This is part of the flexibility of awesome and allows you to do things other window managers cannot, such as pull up more than one tag at once - rendering them in whatever layout the first called tag is defined with.

The other tags besides the one you are looking at are not being rendered in another space, they are not being shown by X at all. When a different tag is called the current windows are hidden and the other tagged windows drawn.

You can see the effects of this if you have a poorly programmed application that re-renders itself on being re-shown even if it the same size. These apps will take a noticeable amount of time to pull up when you switch tag views.

While it might be technically possible to re-write everything with OpenGL or some other buffered system so you could pre-render things before showing them and thus show transition effects, this isn't the focus of the awesome project and I don't expect to see a feature like that soon. Enjoy it for what it is.

Awesome – Keyboard Layout Switch Shortcuts

Your keyboard bindings are not working because your keyboard no longer has those keysyms.

If you want to have, for example, Alt+F do something, then you need "F" in some key. But if you load "ru" alone, then there is no "F" at all (nor any latin letter).

I think, specially when you need to handle multiple layouts, that it is much better to let X11 (through setxkbmap) do the job for you; the way the window managers do it is much more limited as you have discovered.

You may also try, as the awfull widget seems to call setxkbmap, to change "ru" with "ru,us", eg:

kbdcfg.layout = { { "us", "" }, { "ru,us", "phonetic" } }

that way, the "us" layout will be stacked on top of the "ru" one when loaded, and the keysysms of the "us" layout, while still not directly typeable, will be seen by the X11 layer that handles the key bindings.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Scroll between tags in Awesome WM

Awesome – Keyboard Layout Switch Shortcuts

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