xvisbell VS bling

4) I'm not aware of that. From a quick Google, I found https://github.com/rianhunter/xvisbell. Feel free to open a issue on the awesome github (https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome).

I wonder if there's a library that has handled something like that. Bling maybe?

Widgets are typically obtained by either using widget collections, such a Vicious or Bling, by "extracting" them from other people's repos or by just writing them yourself. Note that, to customize awesome, you really do want to learn how to use the widget system, as otherwise, you'd be missing out on one of awesome's greatest strengths. Also, no, it doesn't matter which distro you use. They are almost always distro independent (except for maybe something like a package update notifier or something, as that really can't be done distro independently). It does however matter whether you use the stable release (4.3 as of now) or the current git master, as stable is about 3 years old while the git master is in very active development. Some of the cooler widgets may only work on the git master branch.

Javacafe01 - evidently he has archived his repo, guess NixOS is getting to him. He is also the primary developer behind Bling which also implements Rubato, but in such a way as to take esoteric to new heights if you aren't used to making sense of the big foot scat that is awesomewm configurations.

About bling library bugs and improvements you can insert the issue directly to github project: https://github.com/BlingCorp/bling/issues

There is an external library for Awesome called Bling that implements scratchpads. I've never used i3 so I'm just assuming they are similar. Here is a link to the docs for the Bling scratchpads.

https://github.com/BlingCorp/bling/blob/master/layout/vertical.lua works for me

This question is asked from time to time. Recently I seen some very good try to implement it. I think it was in Bling. Check the tag preview widget there.

Bling