No application menus in awesome

Question

Yesterday I installed awesome via an excellent YouTube video. Today, I'm trying to be productive; Unfortunately, I can't find the menus to my applications: thunderbird, chromium-browser, etc.

How do I get these to appear? Thanks

Answer 1

Try using the key combination Mod4+r it will display the word Run: on the top (besides the tags, assuming you're using a barebones configuration) then you can type the program you want to run, if it's installed you can use Tab key for auto-completion.

E.g.:

1. Press Mod4+r
2. Note the Run: dialog at the top
3. Type thun then press Tab key if installed you will see that it completes to thunderbird and cycle with other similar commands/applications after pressing several times the Tab key
4. Press Return/Enter key to execute the program

Another options are:

• Install dmenu found on package suckless-tools (something similar in Ubuntu?)

• Load a menu (if not loaded!) for instance in Debian is done like this on the rc.lua file under ~/.config/awesome/:

   -- Load Debian menu entries
   require("debian.menu")
  -- {{{ Menu
   -- Create a laucher widget and a main menu
   myawesomemenu = {
       { "manual", terminal .. " -e man awesome" },
       { "edit config", editor_cmd .. " " .. awesome.conffile },
       { "restart", awesome.restart },
       { "quit", awesome.quit }
   }
  mymainmenu = awful.menu({ items = { { "awesome", myawesomemenu, beautiful.awesome_icon },
                                       { "Debian", debian.menu.Debian_menu.Debian },
                                       { "open terminal", terminal }
                                     }
                          })
  mylauncher = awful.widget.launcher({ image = image(beautiful.awesome_icon),
                                        menu = mymainmenu })
  

Of course the file /etc/xdg/awesome/debian/menu.lua must exist or something similar, you can create your own.

Answer 2

awesome includes menubar. By default, pressing Mod+p will open a dmenu-like applications menu at the top of the screen.