[4] A window manager is probably one of the most used software in your day-to-day tasks, with your Web browser, mail reader and text editor.

Power users and programmers have a big range of choice between several tools for these day-to-day tasks.

awesome tries to complete these tools with what we miss: an extensible, highly configurable window manager.

It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and heavily extensible using the Lua programming language.

In doing so, the author has created what he calls a framework window manager[5] for users to expand and adapt to their own needs.

[5] On May 20, 2008, Danjou announced in an e-mail to the awesome mailing list[8] that a new format for the configuration file will be used in 3.0 release.

Work on the XCB port was started by Arnaud Fontaine, one of the current Awesome developers,[14] in January 2008.

[13] In his message to the list, he emphasized the following as main advantages of using XCB: "modular architecture; direct access to the protocols; multithreading; asynchronous requests/replies;".

[7] awesome is distributed on a wide range of Unix-like operating systems, including Arch Linux,[16] Debian,[17] Fedora Linux, Gentoo,[18] Ubuntu,[19] Source Mage, openSUSE,[20] Mageia, NixOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.