Scroll between tags in Awesome WM

awesomecompositescrollingwindow-manager

How can I add smooth scrolling between tags in the Awesome WM? I realize I can't run compiz with Awesome. Is there something comparable that I can run? I don't need any other effects, switching between tags quickly is just disoreinting when it jumps as it does.

EDIT: While I didn't find an exact answer, cairo-compmgr gives smooth fading between tags and clients. I'm satisfied 🙂

Best Answer

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.

Related Solutions

Assigning awesome keybinding for more than 9 tags

I couldn't make the viewidx method working but I ended up doing the following, which worked:

awful.key({ modkey, }, "a", function ()
    local screen = mouse.screen
    if tags[screen][10] then
         awful.tag.viewonly(tags[screen][10]) end end),

Window Manager – How to Set Awesome’s Wibox Visible Only for Certain Tags

I don't know about any ready-to-use modules, but I built something like that with event handlers. First you initialize your wibox as usual. Then make it invisible:

your_wibox.visible = false

Then add the signal handler for showing it to the tag(s) on which it should be visible:

your_tag:add_signal("property:selected", function(tag)
        your_wibox.visible = tag.selected
end)

This triggers, whenever the selected property of the tag changes, so the wibox' visibility changes with the visibility of the tag.

I don't think, that putting that into a module could make it much shorter.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Assigning awesome keybinding for more than 9 tags

Window Manager – How to Set Awesome’s Wibox Visible Only for Certain Tags

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