If you use Awesome, awesome-client can be a handy way to run snippets of Lua code against a running instance for debugging and one-off modifications. But for longer scripts, while you can just cat a Lua file into awesome-client, this approach has some drawbacks:
- Getting output from such a script can be a little annoying - you can use
print(), which will end up in Awesome's standard output, or you could usenaughty.notify, which disappears after some time and isn't usable in a shell pipeline. - Loading modules via
require()are loaded relative to your Awesome config directory, and due to Lua's module loader, are only loaded the first time they're used.
So this tool I wrote - awl - compensates for those shortcomings:
print()output goes to awl's standard output, so you can use it in a shell pipeline for analysis.require()loads modules relative to the script you're running, and the "only load once" behavior is per-invocation ofawl.
I wrote this to explore some memory-related issues I was having with Awesome, so there are a number of memory-related modules and scripts that are included in this repo.