Only show title bar on floating windows - lua

Question

In awesome 4.0, is there a way to only display the titlebar on floating windows?
Looking at the docs, there doesn't seem to be an option out of the box.
To specify; I'm looking for a solution that work when I dynamically switch windows between tiling and floating.

Answer 1

A bit late, but I wanted to do this too and I got it mostly working. It doesn't cover all the cases when you'd expect a client to show or hide its titlebar, but it's close enough for my use case.
It's rather simple, first you need to disable titlebars for every client, so add titlebars_enabled = false in the properties of the default rule matching all clients.
Then, when a client becomes floating you need to toggle on his titlebar, and toggle it off when it stops floating.
I wrote this little helper function to make the code clearer. It's rather simple, if s is true then show the bar, hide it otherwise. But there's a catch, in our case the windows never had a titlebar so it isn't created yet. We send the signal to have one built for us if the current one is empty.
-- Toggle titlebar on or off depending on s. Creates titlebar if it doesn't exist
local function setTitlebar(client, s)
if s then
if client.titlebar == nil then
client:emit_signal("request::titlebars", "rules", {})
end
awful.titlebar.show(client)
else
awful.titlebar.hide(client)
end
end
Now we can hook the property change:
--Toggle titlebar on floating status change
client.connect_signal("property::floating", function(c)
setTitlebar(c, c.floating)
end)
But that only applies to clients that changes states after being created. We need a hook for new clients that are born floating or in a floating tag:
-- Hook called when a client spawns
client.connect_signal("manage", function(c)
setTitlebar(c, c.floating or c.first_tag.layout == awful.layout.suit.floating)
end)
And finally, if the current layout is floating, clients don't have the floating property set, so we need to add a hook for layout changes to add the tittlebars on clients inside.
-- Show titlebars on tags with the floating layout
tag.connect_signal("property::layout", function(t)
-- New to Lua ?
-- pairs iterates on the table and return a key value pair
-- I don't need the key here, so I put _ to ignore it
for _, c in pairs(t:clients()) do
if t.layout == awful.layout.suit.floating then
setTitlebar(c, true)
else
setTitlebar(c, false)
end
end
end)
I didn't want to spend to much time on this so it doesn't cover cases where a client gets tagged in a floating layout, or when a client is tagged multiple times and one of those tag is floating.

Answer 2

Change
{ rule_any = {type = { "normal", "dialog" }
}, properties = { titlebars_enabled = true }
},
to
{ rule_any = {type = { "dialog" }
}, properties = { titlebars_enabled = true }
},

Answer 3

Niverton's solution works very well for simply switching from tiling to floating modes; however, floating windows will lose their titlebar when maximized and then unmaximized. To fix this, a better solution would be to replace
client.connect_signal("property::floating", function(c)
setTitlebar(c, c.floating)
end)
with
client.connect_signal("property::floating", function(c)
setTitlebar(c, c.floating or c.first_tag and c.first_tag.layout.name == "floating")
end)
This should fix the issue so that windows can be properly maximized without having to switch to tiling mode and back to get the titlebars again.
I found this general idea on a reddit post about the subject, provided by u/Ham5andw1ch. I have just simplified the code using Niverton's proposed function and some short-circuit logic.