By default, the Awesome window manager sets up 9 tags and uses a rather clever method for setting keyboard shortcuts for those tags.

And that is also one of the irritations of using Awesome because I have gotten into the habit of using more virtual screens (“tags”) than this. After a dumb way of increasing the number, I have come up with a rather improved method that can be used to replace the existing method in the Awesome rc.lua file :-

local taglist = { "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "0", "-", "=" }
-- The list of tags that I use.
…
 awful.tag( taglist, s, awful.layout.layouts[1])
…
for i = 1, #taglist do
  globalkeys = awful.util.table.join(globalkeys,
    awful.key({ modkey}, taglist[i],
                  function ()
                        local screen = awful.screen.focused()
                        local tag = screen.tags[i]
                        if tag then
                           tag:view_only()
                        end
                  end,
                  {description = "view tag", group = "tag"}),
        awful.key({ modkey, "Control" }, taglist[i],
                  function ()
                      local screen = awful.screen.focused()
                      local tag = screen.tags[i]
                      if tag then
                         awful.tag.viewtoggle(tag)
                      end
                  end,
                  {description = "toggle tag", group = "tag"}),
        awful.key({ modkey, "Shift" }, taglist[i],
                  function ()
                      if client.focus then
                          local tag = client.focus.screen.tags[i]
                          if tag then
                              client.focus:move_to_tag(tag)
                          end
                     end
                  end,
                  {description = "move focused client to tag", group = "tag"}),
        awful.key({ modkey, "Control", "Shift" }, taglist[i],
                  function ()
                      if client.focus then
                          local tag = client.focus.screen.tags[i]
                          if tag then
                              client.focus:toggle_tag(tag)
                          end
                      end
                  end,
                  {description = "toggle focused client on tag", group = "tag"})
    )
end

That’s three different parts of the code to change – a list of tags to use at the top of the file, a replacement somewhere in the middle, and a large chunk replacing existing code at the end of the keyboard configuration. I don’t claim this is better than the standard way, but it is handy for me.