What is this?

widget.lua is just meant to be a nice starting point for creating your own Awesome WM widget. It contains some basic boilerplate and some easily forgettable things I wanted to document so that I do not forget them later.

How do I customize the boilerplate?

widget.lua is setup to be a basic widget that uses the awful.widget.watch function to update a widget on an interval. Change the external_command to suit your needs. Implement the update_widget function to lookup the correct widget or widgets you would like to update (using get_children_by_id) from your widget_template and use the set_ methods to update as needed. (set_markup, set_text, set_value etc.) The widget_template can be overridden by passing a custom one via the args in rc.lua. This allows customization from your rc.lua much like the stock Awesome WM taglist and tasklist widgets.

How do I use my widget in Awesome WM?

Rename widget.lua to match your widget. Place it in your ~/.config/awesome/ folder. Example ~/.config/awesome/myfolder/mywidget.lua. In your rc.lua you can then

-- import your widget class
local mywidget = require( "myfolder.mywidget" )
-- and in your wibox setup
	mywidget()
-- or to pass arguments..
	mywidget({ myarg = "value" })