crylia-theme VS the-glorious-dotfiles

If you want a usable rice with most features, link is the best for you imo. It is written using pure awesome, well for the most part.

I'm running pop os and it's because it's a part of this https://github.com/Crylia/crylia-theme and i foolishly assumed that i just had everything to make it because i have used make on other things before not realizing the differences between them

Awesome is very different from other window managers...It's a framework window manager! Through its API you can create widgets that are not possible in other WMs (ex: [1],[2],[3].[4]). Furthermore, AwesomeWM can be used as a tiling window managers and as a stacking window managers (like XFCE).

Yes it is possible to do with Awesome API, some examples: https://github.com/rxyhn/yoru#ocean--gallery https://github.com/AlphaTechnolog/dotfiles/tree/awesomewm https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles https://github.com/Kasper24/KwesomeDE

I have a popup volume slider whenever I hit a keybind, learnt from glorious's awesomewm

like this? https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles

I 'm assuming you created the "switch_stop" tag? Unless, you're changing the taglist names (I don't see any purpose for the "id = switch_stop"). The tag names or 'id' in this context can be found here, https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles/blob/master/config/awesome/linear/configuration/tags/init.lua .

I would also recommend read through other ppls configurations on GitHub like Manilarome, JavaCafe or even mine which I think are pretty decent

https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles https://github.com/CSAndrew/MacOSM

Start exploring official documentation, there is section about default configuration. You can also take a look at existing themes like awesome-copycats or manilaromes glorious dotfiles and see how they do things and start experimenting.