awesome-retain

Retain is an Awesome Lua module for retaining tags and their layouts between restarts and screen adds/removes.

Dependencies

Awesome v4.1 or at least after the gears.filesystem commit.
You can change two lines to make it work with Awesome v4.0, see below.

Retain saves its data in JSON format using lua-json.

Usage

In your rc.lua add local retain = require("retain") after all the core modules.

Find the line where you define your awful.layout.layouts. After that line add retain.tags.load().

The default fallback tags and layouts are awesome's defaults. You can set your own by setting:

retain.tags.defaults.names = {"tag name", "tag name", ...}
retain.tags.defaults.layouts = {layout, layout, ...}

where names and layouts are acceptable parameters to awful.tag()

For example:

retain.tags.defaults.names = {"A", "B", "C"}
retain.tags.defaults.layouts = {l[2], l[4], l[6]}

where l = awful.layout.layouts.

In your awful.screen.connect_for_each_screen function, change your awful.tag() line to:
awful.tag(retain.tags.getnames(s), s, retain.tags.getlayouts(s))

The default save file is:
retain.tags.savefile = gears.filesystem.get_configuration_dir() .. ".retained"
If you want to save to a different location, change the variable retain.tags.savefile.

Signals added

Retain connects three functions upon loading:

• screen removed signal, retain.tags.save
• screen added (connect_for_each_screen), saves the screen.index variable to screen.sid
• awesome exit, retain.tags.save_all

The extra sid variable is needed because index is queried through the screen list object internally, when a screen is removed the index variable is no longer valid.

Awesome v4.0

To make it work with Awesome v4.0:

• Remove the local gfs = require("gears.filesystem") line
• Change gfs.get_configuration_dir() to awful.util.get_configuration_dir()