A widget for the Awesome Window Manager to control the volume

This widget is a wrapper around the pulseaudio_dbus library for the Awesome Window Manager.

Requirements

In addition to the requirements listed in the rockspec file, you will need the Awesome Window Manager and PulseAudio with DBus enabled (for more information about this, see the pulseaudio_dbus documentation).

You will also need the DBus headers (dbus.h) installed. For example, Debian and Ubuntu provide the DBus headers with the libdbus-1-dev package, Fedora, RedHad and CentOS provide them with the dbus-devel package, while Arch provides them (alongside the binaries) with the libdbus package.

Installation

Using Luarocks

Probably, the easiest way to install this widget is to use luarocks:

luarocks install pulseaudio_widget

You can use the --local option if you don't want or can't install it system-wide

This will ensure that all its dependencies are installed.

A note about ldbus

This module depends on the ldbus module that provides the low-level DBus bindings

luarocks install --server=http://luarocks.org/manifests/daurnimator \
    ldbus \
    DBUS_INCDIR=/usr/include/dbus-1.0/ \
    DBUS_ARCH_INCDIR=/usr/lib/dbus-1.0/include

As usual, you can use the --local option if you don't want or can't install it system-wide.

From source

Alternatively, you can copy the pulseaudio_widget.lua file in your ~/.config/awesome folder. You will have to install all the dependencies manually though (see the rockspec file for more information).

Configuration

The widget displays volume icons that are searched in the folder defined by beautiful.pulse_icon_theme with extension beautiful.pulse_icon_extension. The default is to look into "/usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/status" for icons whose extension is ".svg".

Specifically, you will need icons named:

• audio-volume-high-symbolic
• audio-volume-medium-symbolic
• audio-volume-low-symbolic
• audio-volume-muted-symbolic

Mouse controls

When the widget is focused:

• Scroll: controls the volume
• Left button: toggles mute
• Right button: launches mixer (defaults to pavucontrol)

Usage

Add the following to your ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua:

Require the module:

-- require *after* `beautiful.init` or the theme will be inconsistent!
local pulse = require("pulseaudio_widget")

Add the widget to your layout:

right_layout:add(pulse)

Finally add some keyboard shortcuts to control the volume:

awful.util.table.join(
  awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", pulse.volume_up),
  awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioLowerVolume", pulse.volume_down),
  awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioMute",  pulse.toggle_muted)
)

Credits

Although heavily modified, this program is derived from the Awesome Pulseaudio Widget (APW).