Awesome: switch apps with dmenu

Published on 13-09-2013 in [ awesome, dmenu, commandline ]

I have been using Awesome as a window manager for several years. It uses a tiling approach, and really manages windows, maximizing available space on my 12” laptop screen. A great addition is dmenu, created by the suckless project. The first use is to pipe applications from the path, which dmenu presents as a horizontal/vertical list, with incremental search.

But dmenu is not limited to this, and wrote a small function which proposes a menu of currently running applications (or clients, as awesome calls them). The selection may be refined by typing a few character which appear in the name of the app or the tag. When selecting enter, the tab changes to the client and it is given focus.

Here is the code:

    local awful= require("awful")
    local beautiful = require("beautiful")
    local naughty   = require("naughty")
    local client=client
    local pairs=pairs
    local table=table
    local print=print

    local dmenuhelpers = {}

    dmenuopts = "-b -i -nf '"..beautiful.fg_normal.."' -nb '"..beautiful.bg_normal.."' -sf '"..beautiful.bg_urgent.."' -sb '"..beautiful.bg_focus.."' -fn '-*-dejavu sans mono-*-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'"

    function dmenuhelpers.switchapp()
      local allclients = client.get(mouse.screen)
      clientsline = ""
      for _,c in ipairs(allclients) do
        clientsline = clientsline .. c:tags()[1].name .. " - " .. c.name .. "\n"
      end
      selected = awful.util.pread("echo '".. clientsline .."' | dmenu -l 10 " .. dmenuopts)
      for _,c in ipairs(allclients) do
        a = c:tags()[1].name .. " - " .. c.name 
        if a == selected:gsub("\n", "") then
          for i, v in ipairs(c:tags()) do
            awful.tag.viewonly(v)
            client.focus = c
            c:raise()
            c.minimized = false
            return
          end
        end
      end
    end

To use it, you need to add the following in your rc.lua:

at the top

  local dmenuhelpers = require("dmenu-helpers")

in the key table

  awful.key({ modkey, "Control" }, "w", function () dmenuhelpers.switchapp()                                        end),