Following on the heels of my google search hotkey in awesome, I decided to tackle expanding the functionality of the run prompt. Awesome’s run prompt, by default, is basically a command-launcher; it chokes on any input that doesn’t represent an executable file.
I wanted it to behave more like the run prompt in other desktops, so that typing in a URL would open the URL in an appropriate application.
With help from Alexander Yakushev on the awesome mailing list, I managed to figure it out….
I’m back to using AwesomeWM on my work desktop; not sure what brought me back, but I will say that overall I prefer the way it handles multiple monitors and multiple desktops a little better than how KDE does it. That, and KWin’s tiling mode is still useless with dual monitors even in 4.8.
Something about running a window manager like Awesome makes you uber-sensitive to operations that require you to do a lot of mouse-maneuvering or manual window management, and thus encourages you to streamline these operations. One such thing for me is searching google for something, an activity which I’m bound to do at least six dozen times during a workday, especially when developing (since I can’t remember API’s for squat).
With a little help from a bash script and surfraw, I came up with a pretty cool solution. (more…)
For years I’ve been a die-hard KDE fan; while I’ll admit to temporarily jumping ship during the tumultuous 4.0 through 4.2 release cycles, and routinely trying out other desktop environments just to see how they schoon, I’ve pretty much stuck with my pal Konqi since back around 3.4.
Awesome window manager. Not much to see, but that's kind of the point...
For my desktop, especially at work, KDE still runs the show. But KDE doesn’t seem to enjoy running properly on my laptop, and frankly does a better job of getting in the way of my workflow than accelerating it. After some time with XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, and even IceWM, I think I finally found what I’ve been looking for in a desktop environment: Awesome.
