Compositing in awesome

A while ago I wrote two widgets for awesome. Later on I’ve added a little more look&feel to my awesome desktop.

Compositing

Very easy, via xcompmgr. I don’t like the huge default shadows (nor pretty much any of the default settings), so I start it from my rc.lua like this:

awful.util.spawn("nautilus -n")
awful.util.spawn("xcompmgr -c -C -f -F -D 2.5 -l -2 -t -2 -r 2 -o 0.25")

Note that I need to start nautilus before running xcompmgr, otherwise tha background won’t word. Passing -n to nautilus will get rid of the desctop icons. Now I get to see the GNOME desktop background instead of my awesome background image, but it’s easy to change using the gconf-editor.

A shiny new GTK engine

While there, I also set up a new GTK engine. For a while I was using the Aurora GTK engine, but I wanted something simpler. Then I stumbled upon the Equinox GTK engine. Simple and nice. The tooltips are very similar to my awesome’s color theme. The buttons are smaller, good for laptop screens. With the light shadows and fading provided by xcompmgr, this engine looks great and works really well with awesome.

Awesome WM widgets GTK Equinox theme

Neutral Plus cursor theme

This is probably the best looking cursor theme in awesome. It’s very similar to the default X cursor theme, so it is unnoticable if an app doesn’t support Xcursor and falls back.

Easy to install, just add this to your ~/.Xresources:

/* Cursor theme: */
Xcursor.theme: Neutral_Plus

Color theme & font settings for urxvt

My ~/.Xdefaults looks something like this:

/* Fonts: */
URxvt*font:             xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=12:autohith=true:antialias=true
URxvt*boldFont:         xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=12:bold:autohint=true:antialias=true
URxvt*italicFont:       xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=12:italic:autohint=true:antialias=true
URxvt*bolditalicFont:   xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=12:bold:italic:autohint=true:antialias=true
/* Colors: */
URxvt*colorBD:          #ffffff
URxvt*foreground:       #b2b2b2
URxvt*background:       #000000
URxvt*color0:           #303030
URxvt*color1:           #b21818
URxvt*color2:           #18b218
URxvt*color3:           #b26818
URxvt*color4:           #1818b2
URxvt*color5:           #b218b2
URxvt*color6:           #18b2b2
URxvt*color7:           #b2b2b2
URxvt*color8:           #686868
URxvt*color9:           #ff5454
URxvt*color10:          #54ff54
URxvt*color11:          #ffff54
URxvt*color12:          #5454ff
URxvt*color13:          #ff54ff
URxvt*color14:          #54ffff
URxvt*color15:          #ffffff
URxvt*underlineColor:   #b26818
/* Borders: */
URxvt*externalBorder:   0
URxvt*internalBorder:   0
/* Scrolling: */
URxvt*saveLines:        12000
URxvt*scrollBar:        false
URxvt*scrollTtyKeypress:true
URxvt*scrollTtyOutput:  false
URxvt*scrollstyle:      plain
URxvt*secondaryScroll:  true
/* Misc: */
URxvt*loginShell:       false
URxvt*urgentOnBell:     true
URxvt*fading:           30
URxvt*shading:          15
URxvt*transparent:      false