Avant Window Navigator

Avant Window Navigator (abbreviated AWN or Awn) is a dock-like bar for Linux, which sits on an edge of a user's screen and tracks open windows. Instead of representing open windows as buttons or segments on a bar, it uses large icons on a translucent background to increase readability and add visual appeal. The program was created by Neil J. Patel.

Avant Window Navigator
Original author(s)Neil J. Patel
Developer(s)Awn-core Team
Stable release
0.4.2 / November 27, 2013; 10 years ago (2013-11-27)
Repository
Written inC, Python, Vala
PlatformUnix-like
Available inEnglish
Type
License
Websitehttps://github.com/p12tic/awn

Both the appearance and functionality of Avant Window Navigator may be customized, and plugins and applets are available, such as to display the progress of a download in Mozilla Firefox or to control a music player like Rhythmbox.[1] The plugins use the D-Bus IPC system, and applets can be written in C, Python or Vala. A sister project, AWN Extras, is a collection of community-contributed applets and plugins. Releases are usually kept in sync with AWN.

One of the major requirements to run older versions of Avant Window Navigator is a compositing window manager. At least version 0.4.0-2 in the Debian repos has either Metacity, xcompmgr, Compiz, xfwm4, KWin or Mutter as a dependency.[2]

Therefore, the user was required to install a compositor,[3] which could tax performance on low-end systems. Some alternatives were to use a lightweight desktop environment such as Xfce, which has a compositing manager since version 4.2.0, or to enable compositing in Metacity when using GNOME.[4] However, support for non-composited environments is available in version 0.4.0.[5][6]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Awn Extras Archived March 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "Avant Window Navigator as Debian package".
  3. ^ Installation (Prerequisites) - AWN Wiki Archived September 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ Enabling compositing with Metacity Archived January 8, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Milestone 0.4 for Awn
  6. ^ Official release blog post
Notes
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