Awesome WM: Ignore wibox geometry

Question

I've been tweaking my rc.lua for a while now, and, in favor of a cleaner look, thought of having the wibox as not visible by default.
I already have the means to toggle the visibility, and set it to not visible by default.
The problem is with the layouts and the window padding.
All layouts (except for floating) respect the wibox geometry when I toggle it's visibility. My idea was having it appear on top of the windows, but when I toggle, all windows resize to make space for the box.
I already tried setting the wibox type to different values, and making it floating.
There's no code on the layout's source that explicitly describes that behavior (to my knowledge, at least), so I think it must be a property of the wibox.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Try unsetting its struts: w:struts{ left = 0, right = 0, bottom = 0, top = 0 } Only top = 0 should be required (assuming your wibox is at the top), but it doesn't hurt to reset other sides as well. :-)

Struts are a concept introduced by EWMH. It allows a window to reserve some space at the edge of the screen. When creating a wibox, awful.wibox sets eg the top strut to the height of the wibox (assuming you have a wibox with position = "top" ). This then causes the C code to subtract this value from the available workarea of the screen.