awesome-sharedtags

A simple implementation for creating tags shared on multiple screens for awesome window manager.

This branch of the library is intended to work with awesome version 3.5 (and all minor versions), but there are other branches with support for other versions.

Features

• Define a list of tags to be usable on all screens.
• Move tags with all clients between screens.
• Everything else should be just as usual.

Installation

1. Clone or download a zip of the repository, and put the sharedtags directory somewhere where you can easily include it, for example in the same directory as your rc.lua file.
2. Modify your rc.lua file. A patch against the default configuration is included in the repository for easy comparison, but keep reading for a textual description.
   1. Require the sharedtags library somewhere at the top of the file.

      local sharedtags = require("sharedtags")
      

   2. Create the tags using the sharedtags() method, instead of the original ones created with awful.tag().

      local tags = sharedtags(
          { name = "main", layout = layouts[2] },
          { name = "www", layout = awful.layout.suit.max },
          { name = "chat", screen = 2, layout = layouts[1] },
          { layout = layouts[2] },
          { screen = 2, layout = layouts[2] }
      )
      

   3. The code for handling tags and clients needs to be changed to use the library.

      for i = 1, 9 do
          globalkeys = awful.util.table.join(globalkeys,
              -- View tag only.
              awful.key({ modkey }, "#" .. i + 9,
                  function ()
                      local tag = tags[i]
                      if tag then
                          sharedtags.viewonly(tag)
                      end
                  end),
              -- Toggle tag.
              awful.key({ modkey, "Control" }, "#" .. i + 9,
                  function ()
                      local tag = tags[i]
                      if tag then
                          sharedtags.viewtoggle(tag)
                      end
                  end),
              -- Move client to tag.
              awful.key({ modkey, "Shift" }, "#" .. i + 9,
                  function ()
                      if client.focus then
                          local tag = tags[i]
                          if tag then
                              awful.client.movetotag(tag)
                          end
                      end
                  end),
              -- Toggle tag.
              awful.key({ modkey, "Control", "Shift" }, "#" .. i + 9,
                  function ()
                      if client.focus then
                          local tag = tags[i]
                          if tag then
                              awful.client.toggletag(tag)
                          end
                      end
                  end))
      end
      

   4. Lastly, since the tag list is now a one-dimensional array, any references to the tags array needs to be changed, for example in the rules section.

      awful.rules.rules = {
          -- Set Firefox to always map on tag number 2.
          { rule = { class = "Firefox" },
            properties = { tag = tags[2] } }, -- or tags["www"] to map it to the name instead
      }
      

3. Restart or reload awesome.

Notes

Because of constraints in the X server, awesome does not allow toggling clients on tags allocated to other screens. Having a client on multiple tags and moving one of the tags will cause the client to move as well.

API

See doc/index.html for API documentation.

Credits

Idea originally from https://github.com/lammermann/awesome-configs, but I could not get that implementation to work.