The thing with window managers is that once you install one, configuring them is a massive time sink. I spent a week during the summer just configuring i3 and polybar and I don’t feel like going through the same with another window manager so I’ll probably just use i3 for a very long time.
This is 100% my problem. I actually love dwm but have sunk so much time into i3. Finding the time to stably configure a whole new environment is pretty tough for me.
@@BrodieRobertson On the other hand, I really do benefit from you, Luke, and DT. Been wondering for awhile if Awesome is a happy medium between i3 and DWM for me and this video really helps!
yeah, it's exactly my problem. I used awesome for too long and spent embarrassingly too much time configuring it even though I don't know lua that much. I'd like to try something like qtile since I know python so much but I just don't wanna spend the time and effort and awesome is great!
I think what's powerful about AwesomeWM is that you can do anything with it's framework. You can make widgets, exit screens, lock screens, and make custom layouts. A friend and I made a module for AwesomeWM called bling that holds a bunch of extra stuff like flash focus, center layout, and tabbed layout (with hot tabs).
I used BSPWM several years, but Awesome I'm using last two years, and it is my highly preferred WM for many reasons. First Brodie, awesome needs different thinking against BSP or i3. The Awesome needs much more time for studying, it is not about some configuration only. It is WM for programmers, to change everything what you need according your workflow, ideas, themes in high programming language, which gives you stronger power against just bash scripts. For example polybar is not good way for me long time, because it is not family of the awesome. I used polybar long time too, but the main principle awesome is different. You will understand this after longer time. You can using manual layouts, not just dynamic layouts. I made several new approaches and make it according my way. Use the master branch, no released version. There are a lot of important changes for events and notifications and thousands more :) You can inspire with my mods and others: github.com/raven2cz/awesomewm-config
Nice. After a long, long break from Linux (I think my WM was fvwm), I’ve started with a DE but AwesomeWM, Qtile and Material Shell (DE but tiling) are on the list. If you ever get stuck on MacOS again have a look at Hammerspoon - Lua bindings to system APIs
One of the better window managers out there, and I have tried a lot of them. Overall, I like it more than dwm, though I do understand C a lot better than Lua.
I'm not really much of a WM user, at the moment. I am, however, seriously looking at giving Qtile a go, though Awseome is running a close second, for me!
I am using qtile after being an Xmonad user for a long time. I am much more comfortable editing python code than Haskell. And qtile is extremely easy to hack and get it do whatever your want, if you know python.
@@torspedia If you are already familiar with general programming concepts like functions, classes, variables etc, learning python and using qtile may be easy. But if you are all new to the programming world, it may be quiet daunting. If you are just now try to learn to code, I would suggest i3.
It's about time! Using this WM for some time, it's pretty good, but configuring can be... tough sometimes, but looking forward for your videos about it! :D
hey brodie, nice video! dont you feel coming from bspwm that awesome has so many unnecessary extras? I love the idea of having separate software for their separate purposes. Also, I really like that bspwm is just barebones and you can script out all ur needs with bspc and bspc subscribe and whatnot.
The power of awesome is that once you understand it's logic and structure hacking things together for it becomes rather trivial, also being able to load libraries in comparison to something like bspwm or dwm means the sky is the limit, and since lua is multi paradigm and a lot less uglier than haskell theoretically puts awesome at feature superiority over xmonad if not parity
I installed awesome once, didn't like the defaults or the configuring process and switched back to dwm at the time. I thought it would be fun to use the title bars but put them on the bottom like emacs but I never found out if it was possible.
@@BrodieRobertson and super+right click to resize as you may already knew. But I still like the title bar to move or close window in case I don't want to put my hand on keyboard
2 VIDEO SUGGESTIONS: 2.1: DEEPER EXPLANATION ON HOW TO INTEGRATE SXHKD INTO AWSM AND HOW AWSM'S KEY BINDINGS WORK IN LUA. 2.2: HOW TO PUT SOME RAM USAGE MODULE IN THE AWSM BAR. (I DON'T WANT MY PC LAGS DURING A VIRTUAL EXAM, CUZ OF NOT HAVING TOO MUCH RAM.) THAT WOULD BE NICE, THANKS :D
My awesome config (based on github.com/lcpz/awesome-copycats ) is configured such that I can drag my windows around using mod + lmb anywhere in the window.
Since it's basically dwm under the hood I would be suprised if you were unable to move a floating window with super + your mouse. Also on dwm I just use my monitor switch shortcut to get my mouse out of fullscreen games. It doesn't move the mouse but it removes the locking to the window so I can just move it then. Until I move it over and back onto the window or click which focuses it again
Oh it's super + mouse, someone else said ctrl. That does work, what I've been doing lately is switching to a different tag but then people can see my desktop
On an unrelated note, I wanted my calcurse notes to use vimwiki syntax. So, I used 'autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead /tmp/calcurse-note.* set filetype=vimwiki'. But it doesn't seem to work. Can someone help? :0
@@netbotcl586 Okay, earlier the above command was inside an augroup named "vimwiki". Does that matter? I removed it from there and pasted it somewhere else, and then it worked!! I don't understand. The "vimwiki" augroup had no other autocmds except `autocmd FileType vimwiki setlocal wrap`
@@Bagginsess Honestly dwm doesn't need coding, it's just a weird config file that you can learn like any other. People overhype it to look cool, you CAN modify the source code but that's true with every open source software. So don't be afraid of trying it! It's pretty good :)
@@coffeedude yea I'm planning to build up an entire artix and suckless system inside of virtual box for practice. I've been looking a lot into how to patch suckless programs and I'm no longer intimidated by them. Best way to learn is to get your hands dirty so I may not understand it now but once I've bricked my system a few times I will.
Holy crap, now I am confused Which WM should I use??? DWM, AwesomeWM I3 BSPWM Etc......... (I have an old laptop with an Intel Celeron processor& a 1 GB RAM) what do you recommend???
@@edvonrattlehead2135 the reason, I like DWM us because it's minimal, not not in aesthetics, but in resources I mentioned my laptop specs, right Also, currently I just want to use DWM& all the awesome SUCKLESS software
Usually, the narrative is people use AwesomeWM as a halfway house intro WM to switching to tiling, due to the ease of use, good default setup and very good floating mode. Some people might stick with Awesome, others might move onto another tiler after a while, but switching to Awesome in the middle of a descent into the world of tiling just feels un-natual for some reason. It shouldn't be, but I can't help the weird sense that this the wrong order to do things in.
@@BrodieRobertson I've maybe seen too many YT videos and linux articles that recommend Awesome as a good into to tilers. I used it first when investigating tilers, but not for long, the devs really should consider tidying those bad and ugly tool libs. Think I've gone through all the Wms at this point, settled mostly on i3, it's not perfect, but I'm comfortable there..
I'd like to add that AwesomeWM is a good way to get into tiling managers, but doesn't throw you into the deep-end and it's floating mode (non-tiling mode) is enabled by default, which is a plus for users coming from things like XFCE, Cinnamon and so on.
Awesome is a good if it's worth it to you if you want to learn lua. If you are using neovim or you want to use Lua there is a point but when I tried it lua became cumbersome and confusing (I was also younger so I could probably work with it now) give it a go but this was my 2 cents (not that anyone asked)
If you say "You need the titlebar to move windows around" and then "I'm never going to use a list of my keybindings" you clearly need to look at the list of keybindings.
Bspwm is a dumb idea to start with, IMHO. It is a super weird data structure to manage windows anyways. Having just a plain list of windows makes it easy to define stacking order, position etc much much easier. You will definitely like any other WM, if you were using bspwm. Only advantage with bspwm is that it can be configured with shell script. But that is now true with most of other wms as well including i3. I would recommend to choose a WM written in a language you are comfortable with. For me dwm is bad because C is a really low level language and lacks a lot of high level data structures and takes a lot of time and effort to get things right. Python - Qtile, Haskell - Xmonad, Lua - Awesome WM. I personally know both Haskell and Xmonad and I felt using Haskell to do some basic things is over complicated compare to Python and hence switched to Qtile and I am very happy. I will soon be contributing to Qtile source as well.
I think bspwm is a really interesting concept and the tree comes with some nice benefits like easy node rotations but it makes some other things way harder
@@BrodieRobertson Opinions differ. I have personally never found myself having more than 3 tiled windows open at the same time. Only two layouts I use are master/stack and max and that's all to it. If I wanted more windows, almost all the time the extra windows I needed were short term, for which I use floating. I have yet to discover even a single case where bspwm would have made my work flow better. Also, if I want a custom layout like in i3, I can always use floating and if I want a reproducible custom layout and I can script it out.
Brodie maybe upload and update your dotfiles on github, so people can play with what you have after seeing this, ... for me it is BSPWM all the way, but for others who knows
@@BrodieRobertson it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I can barely handle learning the nuances of one window manager and remembering all of the key combinations. I tip my hat to you for learning all of these window managers and being able to explain them.
@Alexander Glavan I notice that it used a few %CPU higher than Xmonad (0% vs 3-4%). I stick with the default config then setup a few keys, move my bar, tried to setup instant volume update, it is then the bar's redraw became extremely slow. Don't know why but I guess XMonad would works for me now.
The worst thing to do is use awesome-copycats, my current rice is way flashier than copycats but without all the bloat it manages to be super fast, really when i first tried copycats it took a good minute to reload awesomewm...
The downside of awesomewm is that when a update hits, its not backwards compatable in terms of configs... Plus, it doesn't really follow the Unix philosophy since you cannot change the bar. Awesomewm for me is very bloated. Do yourself a favour and try xmonad. It's the most powerful, Unix philosophy adhered to window manager.
You can use polybar or even lxpanel in awesome, it can do as much or as little as you want, from setting wallpapers to not set anhthing and you can even use dunst for notifications
The thing with window managers is that once you install one, configuring them is a massive time sink. I spent a week during the summer just configuring i3 and polybar and I don’t feel like going through the same with another window manager so I’ll probably just use i3 for a very long time.
This is 100% my problem. I actually love dwm but have sunk so much time into i3. Finding the time to stably configure a whole new environment is pretty tough for me.
That's completely fair, and when you don't have as much time to spend on things like this it will take much longer than it needs to
@@BrodieRobertson On the other hand, I really do benefit from you, Luke, and DT. Been wondering for awhile if Awesome is a happy medium between i3 and DWM for me and this video really helps!
yeah, it's exactly my problem. I used awesome for too long and spent embarrassingly too much time configuring it even though I don't know lua that much.
I'd like to try something like qtile since I know python so much but I just don't wanna spend the time and effort and awesome is great!
@@BrodieRobertson That's when I use Luke's build of DWM and have been satisfied with it for more than 2 years.
Welcome to the awesome side of linux window managers
You can use the Lua knowledge you'll gradually gain for Neovim too.
You could do the same with Sawfish and Emacs
@@eMorphized ppl still use sawfish?
@@florianfelix8295 I do occasionally
I think what's powerful about AwesomeWM is that you can do anything with it's framework. You can make widgets, exit screens, lock screens, and make custom layouts. A friend and I made a module for AwesomeWM called bling that holds a bunch of extra stuff like flash focus, center layout, and tabbed layout (with hot tabs).
I've seen some of the crazy stuff that people have done on unixporn so it doesn't surprise me
Hello java 👀
@@toprecorporation 🤔
@@bakaotaku2002 hello baka
The best thing of the window showing key bindings is that it also shows the key bindings of the program you have active.
Awesome, Brodie! We're waiting for you in dwm!
I know the cult doors are always open
I swear you will end up using plain vanilla Gnome with Adwaita and GTK4 only apps by the end of this year.
why do you say it?
I used BSPWM several years, but Awesome I'm using last two years, and it is my highly preferred WM for many reasons. First Brodie, awesome needs different thinking against BSP or i3. The Awesome needs much more time for studying, it is not about some configuration only. It is WM for programmers, to change everything what you need according your workflow, ideas, themes in high programming language, which gives you stronger power against just bash scripts. For example polybar is not good way for me long time, because it is not family of the awesome. I used polybar long time too, but the main principle awesome is different. You will understand this after longer time.
You can using manual layouts, not just dynamic layouts. I made several new approaches and make it according my way.
Use the master branch, no released version. There are a lot of important changes for events and notifications and thousands more :)
You can inspire with my mods and others:
github.com/raven2cz/awesomewm-config
That's really interesting. I think I'd start with the default for a little bit but thanks for the link - it's a great peek into Awesome's flexibility.
Nice. After a long, long break from Linux (I think my WM was fvwm), I’ve started with a DE but AwesomeWM, Qtile and Material Shell (DE but tiling) are on the list.
If you ever get stuck on MacOS again have a look at Hammerspoon - Lua bindings to system APIs
Or you could use XQuartz and make it take over the desktop.
One of the better window managers out there, and I have tried a lot of them. Overall, I like it more than dwm, though I do understand C a lot better than Lua.
The Awesome framework seems to be really well documented so even not knowing Lua I can get a lot done
@@BrodieRobertson Yes. I thought that Lua would be an obstacle, but then I saw the /doc/api page. Definitely one of my favorite WMs.
I'm not really much of a WM user, at the moment. I am, however, seriously looking at giving Qtile a go, though Awseome is running a close second, for me!
You don't have to uninstall your regular graphical environment, give it a shot if you don't like it just uninstall it
I am using qtile after being an Xmonad user for a long time. I am much more comfortable editing python code than Haskell. And qtile is extremely easy to hack and get it do whatever your want, if you know python.
@@BrodieRobertson ta for that. I'll have to see how that works on Kubuntu, as KDE is my main DE!
@@SenthilBabuji Python is a language that I am planning on learning, which is one of the reasons that got me interested in Qtile!
@@torspedia If you are already familiar with general programming concepts like functions, classes, variables etc, learning python and using qtile may be easy. But if you are all new to the programming world, it may be quiet daunting. If you are just now try to learn to code, I would suggest i3.
It's about time!
Using this WM for some time, it's pretty good, but configuring can be... tough sometimes, but looking forward for your videos about it! :D
hey brodie, nice video!
dont you feel coming from bspwm that awesome has so many unnecessary extras?
I love the idea of having separate software for their separate purposes.
Also, I really like that bspwm is just barebones and you can script
out all ur needs with bspc and bspc subscribe and whatnot.
The power of awesome is that once you understand it's logic and structure hacking things together for it becomes rather trivial, also being able to load libraries in comparison to something like bspwm or dwm means the sky is the limit, and since lua is multi paradigm and a lot less uglier than haskell theoretically puts awesome at feature superiority over xmonad if not parity
>haskell
>ugly
pick one
@@thegroosh the whole reason spectrwm was created was because haskell was hell to work with
There is the awesome way and the Brodie way. Got it.
I installed awesome once, didn't like the defaults or the configuring process and switched back to dwm at the time. I thought it would be fun to use the title bars but put them on the bottom like emacs but I never found out if it was possible.
Betrayal! But tbh what I have works and there's no real reason to switch but this will be a fun journey to watch
I like awesome but I feel like I don't do enough cool stuff with my config to justify the RAM hit awesome has compared to other wms.
It's not that different though
Thank you, Brodie. I used to use Awesome and liked it a lot.
I knew there was a reason so many people used it
No way!!! You switched again!! Well let's see how it goes
That makes it sound like I switch all the time
@@BrodieRobertson well, time goes by quick for me, so it seems like you just switched to bspwm yesterday.
@@smhsophie I know the feeling it feels like yesterday when the channel had under 1000 subs
I love Awesome but the config is crazy!
You can actually ctrl click on the window to move it if it's floating.
Not in my config at least
Edit: It was actually super + click
@@BrodieRobertson and super+right click to resize as you may already knew. But I still like the title bar to move or close window in case I don't want to put my hand on keyboard
2 VIDEO SUGGESTIONS:
2.1: DEEPER EXPLANATION ON HOW TO INTEGRATE SXHKD INTO AWSM AND HOW AWSM'S KEY BINDINGS WORK IN LUA.
2.2: HOW TO PUT SOME RAM USAGE MODULE IN THE AWSM BAR. (I DON'T WANT MY PC LAGS DURING A VIRTUAL EXAM, CUZ OF NOT HAVING TOO MUCH RAM.)
THAT WOULD BE NICE, THANKS :D
I think your shift key might be stuck.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUGGESTIONS
My awesome config (based on github.com/lcpz/awesome-copycats ) is configured such that I can drag my windows around using mod + lmb anywhere in the window.
You should try SpectrWM
It is on the very long list
Since it's basically dwm under the hood I would be suprised if you were unable to move a floating window with super + your mouse. Also on dwm I just use my monitor switch shortcut to get my mouse out of fullscreen games. It doesn't move the mouse but it removes the locking to the window so I can just move it then. Until I move it over and back onto the window or click which focuses it again
Oh it's super + mouse, someone else said ctrl. That does work, what I've been doing lately is switching to a different tag but then people can see my desktop
Love awesome but to launch apps in click menu we gotta specify in 3 spots....lua seems repetive but im pretty new at it. Good video
HI, which file manager is that?
On an unrelated note, I wanted my calcurse notes to use vimwiki syntax.
So, I used 'autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead /tmp/calcurse-note.* set filetype=vimwiki'. But it doesn't seem to work. Can someone help? :0
I did that and open calcurse-note.ds or whatever for * and it works just fine.
Are you sure you are naming the file correctly?
@@netbotcl586 Yeah, I did the exact same thing. I don't understand. :( Im running neovim btw, Im not sure if that makes a difference
@@netbotcl586 Okay, earlier the above command was inside an augroup named "vimwiki". Does that matter? I removed it from there and pasted it somewhere else, and then it worked!! I don't understand. The "vimwiki" augroup had no other autocmds except `autocmd FileType vimwiki setlocal wrap`
For 2021, I abandoned Arch + DWM and now run Mint 20.1.
How did you make that decision
@@BrodieRobertson bit of incompetence, bit of work. I botched my build in the middle of a big work project. Needed to get running fast
Well, you can actually hold Super key and drag the window with mouse, instead of showing the title bar.
He’ll be back to bspwm soon. 😊
Am I supposed to be like Luke with dwm
@@BrodieRobertson if I could code I'd use dwm :(
so clean and simple
@@Bagginsess Honestly dwm doesn't need coding, it's just a weird config file that you can learn like any other. People overhype it to look cool, you CAN modify the source code but that's true with every open source software. So don't be afraid of trying it! It's pretty good :)
@@coffeedude yea I'm planning to build up an entire artix and suckless system inside of virtual box for practice. I've been looking a lot into how to patch suckless programs and I'm no longer intimidated by them. Best way to learn is to get your hands dirty so I may not understand it now but once I've bricked my system a few times I will.
Hay make a video about awesome bar like add other useful widget...
You should upload your config to your dotfiles on github :)
Holy crap, now I am confused
Which WM should I use???
DWM,
AwesomeWM
I3
BSPWM
Etc.........
(I have an old laptop with an Intel Celeron processor& a 1 GB RAM)
what do you recommend???
If you are ok with compiling and know c dwm may be the fastest, but is probably the hardest to configure
@@edvonrattlehead2135 I'm no programmer
But I DO know C++, PYTHON& some RUST
Perhaps try your hand at dwm, worst case scenario u h8 it
@@edvonrattlehead2135 the reason, I like DWM us because it's minimal, not not in aesthetics, but in resources
I mentioned my laptop specs, right
Also, currently I just want to use DWM& all the awesome SUCKLESS software
I used to use a 32bit celeron laptop with like 2gb of ram with ubuntu for years
Are you going to add your config to your dotfiles?
Soon if I don't forget
Usually, the narrative is people use AwesomeWM as a halfway house intro WM to switching to tiling, due to the ease of use, good default setup and very good floating mode.
Some people might stick with Awesome, others might move onto another tiler after a while, but switching to Awesome in the middle of a descent into the world of tiling just feels un-natual for some reason. It shouldn't be, but I can't help the weird sense that this the wrong order to do things in.
I just gravitate to what I think looks cool, don't think too hard about it
@@BrodieRobertson I've maybe seen too many YT videos and linux articles that recommend Awesome as a good into to tilers. I used it first when investigating tilers, but not for long, the devs really should consider tidying those bad and ugly tool libs. Think I've gone through all the Wms at this point, settled mostly on i3, it's not perfect, but I'm comfortable there..
I did like awesome a lot, but I eventually went on to qtile just because I was much more comfortable with python than lua...
I've got a lot of python experience, maybe I'll follow you at some point
I'd like to add that AwesomeWM is a good way to get into tiling managers, but doesn't throw you into the deep-end and it's floating mode (non-tiling mode) is enabled by default, which is a plus for users coming from things like XFCE, Cinnamon and so on.
And here I switched to DWM
Maybe I'll join the cult one day
Is it just me with the audio out of sync with the video?
still not xmonad or spectrwm level... but at least youre finally using a good window manager... 😏
How does spectrwm compare to xmonad? I find that Xmonad is massively more extensible.
If anything awesome is more extensible than xmonad, haskell is ugly as hell
Tried almost all of tiling wm except awesome. What I read about awesome it's they change the api and one day you daily driver stops working
Go Xmonad. :) You will love it.
Awesome is a good if it's worth it to you if you want to learn lua. If you are using neovim or you want to use Lua there is a point but when I tried it lua became cumbersome and confusing (I was also younger so I could probably work with it now) give it a go but this was my 2 cents (not that anyone asked)
I appreciate the feedback from someone who's used it
If you say "You need the titlebar to move windows around" and then "I'm never going to use a list of my keybindings" you clearly need to look at the list of keybindings.
That was my first impressions of the window manager, I know there's a better option now
Bspwm is a dumb idea to start with, IMHO. It is a super weird data structure to manage windows anyways. Having just a plain list of windows makes it easy to define stacking order, position etc much much easier. You will definitely like any other WM, if you were using bspwm. Only advantage with bspwm is that it can be configured with shell script. But that is now true with most of other wms as well including i3.
I would recommend to choose a WM written in a language you are comfortable with.
For me dwm is bad because C is a really low level language and lacks a lot of high level data structures and takes a lot of time and effort to get things right.
Python - Qtile, Haskell - Xmonad, Lua - Awesome WM.
I personally know both Haskell and Xmonad and I felt using Haskell to do some basic things is over complicated compare to Python and hence switched to Qtile and I am very happy. I will soon be contributing to Qtile source as well.
I think bspwm is a really interesting concept and the tree comes with some nice benefits like easy node rotations but it makes some other things way harder
@@BrodieRobertson Opinions differ. I have personally never found myself having more than 3 tiled windows open at the same time. Only two layouts I use are master/stack and max and that's all to it. If I wanted more windows, almost all the time the extra windows I needed were short term, for which I use floating. I have yet to discover even a single case where bspwm would have made my work flow better.
Also, if I want a custom layout like in i3, I can always use floating and if I want a reproducible custom layout and I can script it out.
Brodie maybe upload and update your dotfiles on github, so people can play with what you have after seeing this, ... for me it is BSPWM all the way, but for others who knows
I'll have to do that
After my chem class we text each other are u alive.
Like u change the window manager we change the pillow every class depending on the situation
another friendship's ended :(
but luckly a new best friend approaches!! ^w^
In this case I still really like bspwm I might go back from time to time
JUST HOLD MOD AND DRAG WITH YOU'RE MOUSE
Pff.. switching window manager, try switching display server :P
EDIT: Window Manager not display manager...
Display manager is a login screen, this is a window manager, but I do want to explore wayland as well
Or bring back Display Postscript!
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?????!!!!!!?????
checkout dwm-flexi or modwm
bloat bloat bloat bloat
based based cringe
dwm or bust..
Your relationships with window managers are relatively short. Some might call you a peeping tom; others call it afraid of commitment.
12 months, 1 year, is that short?
@@BrodieRobertson it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I can barely handle learning the nuances of one window manager and remembering all of the key combinations. I tip my hat to you for learning all of these window managers and being able to explain them.
le lua scripting
Now you gotta shave and switch to XMonad.
Seriously, the performance problems in Awesome turned me away.
Should I shave the beard as well and just become Luke
@@BrodieRobertson Luke now looks younger than you
@Alexander Glavan I notice that it used a few %CPU higher than Xmonad (0% vs 3-4%). I stick with the default config then setup a few keys, move my bar, tried to setup instant volume update, it is then the bar's redraw became extremely slow. Don't know why but I guess XMonad would works for me now.
The worst thing to do is use awesome-copycats, my current rice is way flashier than copycats but without all the bloat it manages to be super fast, really when i first tried copycats it took a good minute to reload awesomewm...
The downside of awesomewm is that when a update hits, its not backwards compatable in terms of configs... Plus, it doesn't really follow the Unix philosophy since you cannot change the bar. Awesomewm for me is very bloated. Do yourself a favour and try xmonad. It's the most powerful, Unix philosophy adhered to window manager.
You can use polybar or even lxpanel in awesome, it can do as much or as little as you want, from setting wallpapers to not set anhthing and you can even use dunst for notifications
If for whatever reason u don't like naughty just use dunst