spectrwm VS picom

I use the tiling WM spectrwm. It lets me pull windows out of tiling mode and into window mode. I think a common operation on most tiling window managers. Most of the time I don't want overlapping windows(thus the tiling WM) but every once in a while I do, so the best of both worlds.

It is a bit obscure but I quite like spectrwm, it fills this sweet spot where it is much simpler than I3 but much more feature complete than DWM.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

are you using spectrwm? it seems like this file comes from there, and they use it to make programs open in particular workspaces: https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm/issues/500

Here is one website with screenshots. https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Spectrwm is by far the easiest WM I've tested. Also Fluxbox is pretty much straightforward.

Spectrwm is by far the most beginner-friendly WM I've ever tested. Im now running EXWM the buffers management is something else.

I'm a recent convert to i3/sway, after a solid decade using spectrwm (which has not been ported to Wayland, I'm afraid).

This is supposedly fixed in the master branch, but there has been no release in over a year - I'll just set corner and shadow excludes and sit down. I'll notice when a new release is here :)

What distro? My pref is for Jonaburg's fork. Ibhagwan is out of date. Pijulius more so. Yshui doesn't have animation.

This configuration uses Qtile extra package and one of my favourite picom fork for minimalistic look with rounded-corners

As others have said, Awesome doesn't ship with a compositor so you need one yourself. My choice is jonaburg's picom fork for the extra included features, but regular picom will do the job.

Install jonaburg picom https://github.com/jonaburg/picom

picom-jonaburg has rounded corners and animations. Window gaps are controlled by your window manager, compositors can't interact with them.

Offtopic: I know you didn't ask this, but I just saw the fork you are using was updated the last time in 2020: https://github.com/jonaburg/picom/tags . The current version of the original https://github.com/yshui/picom/releases got updated this year (2 years more development!). Unless you are using features that is only available in that fork, I would try the mainline, which also got some of these features too, in example support for rounding corners. So maybe this newer version works better.

I am using Qtile (on a Laptop running Ubuntu 20.04), with jonaburg-picom, which is blurring my Qtile bar since some parts of it are configured to be transparent. How do I get rid of that blur, can someone help me with this?

This is how I do it with awesomeWM on EndeavourOS. Maybe this will help you. I'm using picom-jonaburg-git.