Awesome 3.5 arrives with modernised foundations

Awesome 3.5 running with a GNOME panel under Ubuntu 12.10

More than three years after its last major release, the developers of awesome have released version 3.5 of their dynamic tiling window manager. The new version, code-named "Last Christmas", includes a large amount of changes, many of which are internal and will not be noticed by users.

Improvements include a switch to a new version of Lua and other changes to future-proof the underlying infrastructure of the window manager. User-facing changes include a new widget layout and changes to the system configuration. With the new release, awesome's dependencies have changed from requiring libev, gperf and luadoc to requiring lgi, ldoc and glib. While lgi (Lua GObject Introspection) is not needed to build awesome, it is a runtime-only dependency and according to the developers "hell will break lose if you don't have lgi".

A complete list of all changes in the new release is available in its change log. Source code for awesome 3.5 is licensed under the GPLv3 and can be downloaded from the project's web site. The window manager can be run stand alone with its own panel or alongside other panel applications, for example as part of a GNOME session.

(fab)