# What is this awesome window manager?

**awesome** is a highly configurable, next generation framework window
manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the
[GNU GPLv2 license](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html).

It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with
every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on their
graphical environment.

<div class="flex-container">
  <div class="row">
    <a class="btn shine" href="https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/documentation/07-my-first-awesome.md.html#">awesome 4.3<br/>documentation<br/>(stable)</a>
    <a class="flex-href" href="https://awesomewm.org/apidoc/documentation/07-my-first-awesome.md.html#">
Docs for latest git version</a>
  </div>
</div>

<div class="screenshot">
[[!img images/screen.png link="images/screen.png" alt="awesome screenshot"]]
</div>


# Concepts

A window manager is probably one of the most used software applications in
your day-to-day tasks, along with your web browser, mail reader and text editor.
Power users and programmers have a big range of choice between several tools
for these day-to-day tasks. Some are heavily extensible and configurable.

**awesome** tries to complete these tools with what we miss: an extensible,
highly configurable window manager.

To achieve this goal, **awesome** has been designed as a framework window
manager.
It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and heavily extensible using the
[Lua](http://www.lua.org) programming language.

We provide a documented API to configure and define the behavior of your
window manager.

<div class="screenshot">
[[!img images/6mon.small.png link="images/6mon.medium.png" alt="awesome running on 6 monitors"]]
</div>

# Features and non-features

* Very stable, fast and small codebase and footprint.
* First window manager using the asynchronous [XCB](http://xcb.freedesktop.org)
  library instead of the old, synchronous
  [Xlib](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlib), which makes **awesome** less
  subject to latency compared to other window managers.
* Documented source code and API.
* No mouse needed: everything can be performed with the keyboard.
* Real multihead support (XRandR) with per screen desktops (tags).
* Implements many [Freedesktop](http://www.freedesktop.org) standards:
  [EWMH](http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html),
  [XDG Base Directory](http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html),
  [XEmbed](http://standards.freedesktop.org/xembed-spec/xembed-spec-latest.html),
  [Desktop Notification](http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/),
  [System Tray](http://standards.freedesktop.org/systemtray-spec/systemtray-spec-latest.html).
* Does not distinguish between layers: there is no floating or tiled layer.
* Uses tags instead of workspaces: allow to place clients on several tags, and
  display several tags at the same time.
* A lot of Lua extensions to add features: dynamic tagging, widget feeding,
  tabs, layouts, …
* [D-Bus](http://dbus.freedesktop.org) support.
* And more.

This is gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!