rice VS the-glorious-dotfiles

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.