# News

<p class="standout">
Awesome 4.0 has been released on 2016-12-25, with 4.1 following on 2017-03-18.
</br>
</br>
Please refer to the <a href="doc/#v4">documentation section</a> for
news/changes and porting tips for your configuration.
</p>

# What is the awesome?

**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 primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with
every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs
graphical environment.

<div class="screenshot">
[[!img images/screen.png alt="awesome screenshot" size="382x216"]]
</div>

# Concepts
A window manager is probably one of the most used software in your day-to-day
tasks, 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 an easily usable and very-well documented API to configure and
define the behaviour 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 asynchronous [XCB](http://xcb.freedesktop.org)
  library instead of the old synchronous
  [Xlib](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlib): make **awesome** less subject to
  latency than many window managers;
* Very well documented source code and API;
* No mouse needed: everything can be performed with keyboard;
* Real multihead support (XRandR, Xinerama or Zaphod mode) with per screen
  desktops (tags);
* Implement 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);
* Doesn't distinguish between layers: there is no floating or tiled layer;
* Use 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 gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!