modalawesome VS awesome-freedesktop

But maybe you will prefer modalawesome. You should have a look to the demo

Ok, here is another set of answers: 1. Not out of the box, but there is a keygrabber which allows you to do this. You can find the implementation in this repo. 2. Pretty easy. Check the article about awful.spawn. The docs for git master version of awesome are generally better, but there are quite a few differences compared to last release.

The closest thing I've seen is modalawesome. It doesn't provide the keybindings but it does provide the interface for defining vi-like key sequences.

You could also check out modal awesome.

Default awesome config doesn't parse .desktop files at all. Some deb based distributions modified it to use awesome-freedesktop but it's surely not an only way to get the application menu (there are stand alone apps like rofi). So first of all you should mention which way to create the menu are you using.

Freedesktop.org compliant menu and desktop icons - older style, but dynamic. Not bad, but not for me. https://github.com/lcpz/awesome-freedesktop

Behold the desktop icons! I present you the awesome-freedesktop module by lcpz: https://github.com/lcpz/awesome-freedesktop