The default title bar provided by Awesome is not quite to my taste. And this posting is about fixing that.
The first part is to select some colours. For me, I prefer window decorations to be subtle … grey scale; the window decorations should disappear until you focus on them. And I’m choosing to have a lighter grey for focused windows, and darker for others. The colours are set in the default-theme.lua file :-
theme.titlebar_fg_normal = "#000000" theme.titlebar_fg_focus = "#000000" theme.titlebar_bg_normal = "#cccccc" theme.titlebar_bg_focus = "#e8e8e8"
The next step is to restrict the number of buttons that appear in the title bar – this is of course a matter of choice, but personally I believe that there are too many buttons by default. This is done within the main configuration file and by deleting the buttons you wish removed, which in my case means removing the lines :-
right_layout:add(awful.titlebar.widget.floatingbutton(c)) right_layout:add(awful.titlebar.widget.ontopbutton(c))
Lastly, and in keeping with making the titlebar less obtrusive, there’s shrinking the titlebar to a sensible size :-
awful.titlebar(c, { size=16 })
Which is added after the line: awful.titlebar(c):set_widget(layout) (it could be merged). There are two features I’d like to use with no method easy enough for a thicko like me to spot :-
- There seems no obvious way to put the title bar on the left (or right) side of the window; it seems an obvious thing to try given that screens are usually far wider than tall. There are hints that there is an attribute (if that’s the right word) called “position”, but I don’t see a way of setting it.
- I have removed a certain number of options for controlling the window, partially because I can never remember what those silly icons mean. But I would quite happily add a menu with all of the relevant methods – and this would be a good place to add the keyboard shortcuts (us old foggies need some helpful hints like that).