Cycle through clients on both screens in awesomewm

Question

I am using awesomewm and have two monitors, so Mod4+j and Mod4+k cycle through windows on current screen only. Is there a way to cycle through all windows/clients on all screens to make it work like ordinary Alt+Tab?

Answer 1

Of course it is!

The key-bindings in awesome are controled by the rc file, which is actually a lua script. The key bindings are just that, they bind keys to lua functions. You are free to make the functions do whatever you want them to do.

In your case, you want to bind those keys to a function that changes the active tag on each screen rather than just the currently focus screen.

Right now you probably have a couple of lines similar to this in your config:

awful.key({ modkey }, "j", awful.tag.viewprev )

...which does just about what it looks like.

What you are going to want to do is change these from simple command calls to the awesome API to be little functions that run a couple of commands in sequence. The awful.tag.viewprev() and aweful.tag.viewnext() functions conveniently take an optional argument of what screen to operate on. By default they work on the current one, but you can over-ride this.

For example, to run the same thing on both screens 1 and 2, the above line might be changed to this:

awful.key({ modkey }, "j", function () awful.tag.viewprev(1); awful.tag.viewprev(2) end)

Keep in mind your context might be a little different. Be sure and watch where various structures like parens, braces, etc are opened and closed and to end lines that are part of lists with a comma. Adapt as necessary to match your config file.

Answer 2

After poking around awful module docs i found a solution. It is hacky, but it works as I wanted it to work.

awful.key({ modkey,           }, "Tab",
    function ()
        awful.client.focus.byidx(1)
        if awful.client.ismarked() then
            awful.screen.focus_relative(-1)
            awful.client.getmarked()
        end
        if client.focus then
            client.focus:raise()
        end
        awful.client.togglemarked()
    end),

This function cycles through clients on current screen, marking them and when they all are marked, jumps to the next screen. Here is what happens step by step:

• we focus the next client
• we check if it is marked and if it is, we move to the next screen and clear marked status from all clients on it
• we raise current client
• and mark it

It is funny because i do not know what "marked" means. Marked clients do not seem to differ from not marked clients visually or by behaviour.

It is strange that i had to write a 10 line function to get something as trivial as multiscreen alt-tab. I might have done something excessive)