Auto-hide the awesome-wibox/taskbar

If you ever wanted to squeeze out that last bit of screen real estate in awesome and only show the wibox when needed (i.e when pressing the ModKey), this is for you.

Since awesome doesn't allow easy access to the states of the Super/Mod-Key itself in rc.lua, one cannot simply show the wibox while the ModKey is pressed and hide it again on release. This little python daemon will sit in the background and do just that.

Extending away from what the name suggests it can also execute any custom lua code on hide or show, specified in the config file.

Installation

Install the xinput binary. The package is named xinput in Debian/Ubuntu and xorg-xinput in Arch. (Some other popular distros don't seem to readily provide this package, according to pkgs.org).

Download the python script directly and put it somewhere nice–~/.config/awesome/ seems fitting–and make it executable.

Arch Linux users can also install the AUR package autohidewibox.

Usage

autohidewibox.py [configfile.conf]

Config files will be tried in the order

• commandline parameter
• ~/.config/awesome/autohidewibox.conf
• ~/.config/autohidewibox.conf
• /etc/autohidewibox.conf

Otherwise settings default to SuperL and SuperR toggling mywibox.

You can simply add autohidewibox.py to your autostart list in rc.lua. It doesn't require special permissions to run.

To terminate the script, simply killall xinput and the script will restore the wibox and shut down.

Note that if, for autostarting programs, you use that little run_once-script that floats around, the safeguard doesn't work and you should therefore add killall xinput to the autostart list before autohidewibox.py so the old script instance will shutdown before awesome restarts.

Dependencies

• xorg-xinput

TODO

• independence from xinput
• leave wibox visible on run/lua_exec etc.
• show wibox when mouse hits bottom of the screen
• ???

Credits

Inspired by the first idea in http://stackoverflow.com/a/21837280 . Thanks :)

License

You may use this code without attribution, that is without mentioning where it's from or who wrote it. I would actually prefer if you didn't mention me. You may even claim it's your own.