Let awesome wm use only a part of the screen

Question

Is there a way to let awesome wm use only a certain part of the screen? say, from pixel 50x50 to pixel 500x500. The rest should be just black and totally unused. In other words this would be imitating having a smaller display or so.

would be nice to hear some advice.

Answer 1

I believe all window managers take over the entire X server display.

However, you could create a nested X server inside a window and run Awesome inside of that. There is an example of this on the Awesome wiki.

Answer 2

Yes, Awesome 4.0 (to be released soon) has a screen.fake_resize method. It does exactly what you want. You can also use 1 fake_add to add a new screen in the unused space if you wish to.

https://awesomewm.org/apidoc/classes/screen.html#screen:fake_resize

This method is not available in Awesome 3.5. If you wish to reproduce that in 3.5, you have to manually edit the C source code. Here is a very crude "patch" for Awesome 3.4 https://github.com/Elv13/Patched-Awesome/commit/4deb0d7c53a0e8b384acffa4ec5a281826ea78a5 . I do not recommend to use this solution.