Why?

Layout-machi is great, however it requires you to use its built-in switcher to manage your open windows. If you are shuffling, swapping, and moving things around often, this could become counter productive.

Machina is built on top of layout-machi, and allows you to bind frequently used actions to your keys and gives you additional user friendly features.

A combination of layout-machi and awesomewm-machina will give you a similar experience to fancy zones on windows.

What?

These are the features I added:

• Quick Expand: Expand focused window to left, right, or vertically. This will make the window snap to the next available region.

• Directional Swapping: Swap windows between regions.

• Directional Shifting: Relocate windows like Elv13's collision module.

• Rotational Shifting: Relocate windows clockwise or counter clockwise. This uses a different algorithm compared to directional shifting and should be more accurate in merging your floating clients to the tiling layout.

• Shuffling: Go backward or forward in a region, and it will cycle the clients inside that area. Kind of like fake tabs.

• Auto-Hide Floating Windows: Often times, the floating windows pollutes your background if you are using useless-gaps. Machina will hide those for you, but they can still be accessed through your window-switcher such as Rofi.

• Floating and Tiled: All keybindings, including swapping work seamlessy on both the tiled and the floating windows. So, if you need to push that terminal to a corner, you can easily do so without changing it to tiling mode.

Next?

The region shuffling works like tabs, but it would be nice to have a visual queue like tabs. That will be in the next version. I'm also planning to add chained keybindings kind of like in emacs and vi that displays a modal help window.

New layout-machi has some logic to auto expand your windows onto multiple regions. For some work flows this might be desired, but I might look into a way to disable that as I find it to get in the way when changing windows from float to tile. This is especially annoying when you have a centered float.

Layout-Machi compatibility

Machina should work just fine with both versions of layout-machi.

Problems?

If you have any issues or recommendations, please feel free to open a request. PRs are most welcome.

Install

switch to your awesome config folder, typically at:

cd ~/.config/awesome

clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/basaran/awesomewm-machina

and call it from your rc.lua

local machina = require('awesomewm-machina')()

Keybindings

This module directly injects into rc.lua and ideally, all keybindings should work unless you override them in your rc.lua.

If you have any issues, you can change in your rc.lua:

root.keys(globalkeys)

to:

root.keys(gears.table.join(root.keys(),globalkeys))

or, you can just copy / paste what you like from init.lua onto your rc.lua globalkeys table.

Some of the default shortcuts are:

modkey + [ : shift to region (counter clock wise, infinite)
modkey + ] : shift to region (clock wise, infinite)

modkey + shift + [ : swap with client on left
modkey + shift + ] : swap with client on right
--|will keep the focus on the region you execute the
--|function, execute again to undo. if there is nothing on
--|the direction, it will look up or down.

modkey + ctrl + [ : swap with client below
modkey + ctrl + ] : swap with client above
--|useful for swapping with clients in corners

modkey + shift + ' : prev within region
modkey + shift + ; : next within region

modkey + insert : quick expand to left side (toggle)
modkey + pageup : quick expand to right side (toggle)
modkey + delete : expand client vertically

modkey + home : center (float or tiled)
--|you can use this one like zooming, when executed on tiled
--|clients, it will toggle back to original region.

modkey + end : toggle float status

modkey + j : focus left
modkey + k : focus down
modkey + l : focus right
modkey + i : focus up

modkey + shift + j : shift to left region
modkey + shift + k : shift to down region
modkey + shift + l : shift to right region
modkey + shift + i : shift to up region

modkey + shift + insert : move to top-left
modkey + shift + page_up :  move to top-right
modkey + shift + home :  move to center

modkey + shift + end :  toggle always on
--|will keep the floating client always visible

modkey + shift + delete :  move to bottom-left
modkey + shift + page_down :  move to bottom-right
--|these will also work with tiled clients

Preview

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/30809170/123538385-ab5f7b80-d702-11eb-9a14-e8b9045d9d27.mp4