Volume Widget

Provides a simple volume widget for the Awesome window manager. It displays the current volume with an icon and allows you to adjust the volume when you press the volume up and down buttons on your keyboard, if you have them.

This widget has been tested on awesome v4.1.

Dependencies

No extra Awesome libraries are required, but the widget uses the amixer command for ALSA, or pactl for PulseAudio.

Setup

1. Navigate to your Awesome config directory (usually ~/.config/awesome) and clone this repository with the following command:

   git clone https://github.com/velovix/awesome.volume-widget
   

2. Create a symlink for the volume-widget.lua file. This is done so that your rc.lua can find the code, and so you can update the widget by simply pulling in changes from this repository later. While still in the Awesome config directory, run the following:

   ln -s $(pwd)awesome.volume-widget/volume-widget.lua volume-widget.lua
   

3. In your rc.lua, add the following near the beginning of the file. This loads up the library and has you access it through the new volume_widget table we're creating.

   local volume_widget = require("volume-widget")
   

4. Add the following line near the beginning of your rc.lua, but after the line in the previous step. Providing an empty table sets all configurations to their defaults. See the configuration section for details, especially if you use Pulse Audio.

   local volume = volume_widget:new({})
   

5. Add the following lines near where other similar key bindings are being made in the rc.lua. This will allow you to control volume with your volume keys on your keyboard.

   awful.key({}, "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", function() volume:up() end),
   awful.key({}, "XF86AudioLowerVolume", function() volume:down() end),
   

6. Finally, to add your widget to the bar, you'll have to add the following line somewhere after the right_layout table is created.

   right_layout:add(volume.widget)
   

7. Restart Awesome WM and you're finished! You should see a white volume icon on the top right of the screen!

Configuration

The default configuration is probably fine for ALSA users, but if you use PulseAudio you will have to do some configuration. Feed configuration options into the new function instead of the default empty table.

• backend: As of now, alsa and pulseaudio are the supported backends.
• step: The amount that the volume should be incremented or decremented. The default is 5.
• device: The device to control. The default is "Master", which will work for ALSA but not PulseAudio. When using PulseAudio, "devices" in this case refer to "sinks". You probably want "0" as your device. You can take a look at your available sinks with pacmd list-sinks.
• card: The card that the widget should modify the volume of. The default is your computer's default card and differs per installation. To get the available cards: aplay -l | awk -F \: '/,/{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}' | uniq

The following is an example configuration:

local volume = volume_widget:new({
    backend="pulseaudio",
    device="0",
    step=2,
    cart="PCH"})