lgi VS awesome-battery_widget

If you want to use GTK (works on Linux/Window/Mac, default for Gnome desktop), you will need to use LGI-module (https://github.com/lgi-devs/lgi).

I'm using LGI, they're Gtk bindings based on GObject Introspection (A middleware to communicate with GLib-based libraries dynamically) meaning that they can access without hand-writed code to all the GLib-based libraries even if they were written in other languages like Vala, C, C++ or Rust.

Alternatively, awesome is build on top of lgi which exposes GLib objects introspection. It means you can reach in your lua code some objects/services exposed through GLib. https://github.com/pavouk/lgi

This is because many people who tried to build from source had problems. LGI, one of awesome's dependencies, currently hardcodes the package search path used by Lua 5.1. Part of the reason for this is that Lua upstream intends Lua to be embedded, which means that detecting an installed Lua version properly is not easy.

The first problem is the same as in this issue. Check the thread, there may be some pointers to the cause of the problem. About modules.color, did you init submodules when you cloned the config?

You have an example in one of the links you provided:

I used this mechanism for my battery widget in awesome https://github.com/Aire-One/awesome-battery_widget. Long story short : I have the upower daemon running on my system, and upowerGLib exposes an API to GLib. It calls a callback function when the battery status change. In my awesome rc.lua, I connect to this callback so the battery widget is automatically always up-to-date with the daemon.