How to Set up a Sticky YouTube Player In Awesome WM

YouTube Player That Sticks Around

After seeing an unfortunate amount of Redit threads along the lines of "How to make awesome remember position and size of floating windows" and "How to limit the width of apps" while searching for, well exactly that... and realising that most responses went one of two ways. Either:

No clue bro here is a random snippet of code I found on the internet^TM.

Read The Fucking Manual.

Absolutely no middle ground. Well after reading the manual, I decided to write this post. The Documentation for the Awesome WM is actually pretty decent, and you should famimilurize yourself with it if you plan on getting into doing any serious customization. If you are just starting to modify your rc.lua head over Here

Things Used:

Awesome - duh...
Youtube-DL
alternatively : yt-dlp
mpv

Installation:

I'm goin to gloss over the installation of the dependencies pretty lightly, but I'm pretty sure you can find more info if you really have trouble.

Awesome WM

I might make a tutorial on how to install Awesome WM, but for now I'm assuming you have that under wraps if you're here.

youtube-dl

Either install it with Curl or pip

Curl

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Pip

sudo -H pip install --upgrade youtube-dl

yt-dlp

Note: This is a fork of youtube-dl, and is not maintained by the original author. The original library has had some performance issues for me recently and this alternative dealt with that for me atleast.

Curl

sudo curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp

Pip

pip3 install yt-dlp

mpv

Either Build from source or install it from your package manager.

Build from source

git clone The mpv repository and build with Meson.

cd mpv
meson build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

Install from your package manager

no really, I'm typing this out for you. I'm assuming if you are still reading this section you will be using APT

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mpv

alternatively you can use either the PPA repo or snap for the more up-to-date version.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/mpv-tests


sudo apt update
sudo apt install mpv

The Actual Good Stuff:

So the actual steps and whatnot to get you started are:

Steps:

Set rules for mpv player spawning.
Set a Signal listener for the mpv players resize signal.
???
Profit.

I have a keybinding that I use to search youtuble and launch the player, I'll relase this at some point but for now let's skip launching mpv. . The code snippets might be a bit messy, I have my awesome config split over a total of uh.... 487 files so it will be cut and pasted out to here.

Awesome mpv Rules

These rules will take place as soon as mpv is launched and will be applied to all mpv players.

Lua

local awful = require("awful")
local gears = require("gears")
local ruled = require("ruled")
local beautiful = require("beautiful")
local client_keys = require("configuration.client.keys")
local client_buttons = require("configuration.client.buttons")

ruled.client.connect_signal("request::rules", function()

	-- Set up the rules for clients we want to float and follow across tags.
	ruled.client.append_rule({
		id = "sticky_floating",
		-- If you only want this to apply to mpv you can uncomment the following
		-- and delete the rule_any section.
		-- rule = {
		-- 	instance = "mpv",
		-- 	class = "mpv",
		-- 	floating = true,
		-- 	sticky = true,
		-- 	ontop = true,
		-- 	type = "normal"
		-- },
		rule_any = {
			instance = {
				-- "Popup",
			},
			class = {
				"mpv",
			},
			role = {
				-- "pop-up",
			},
		},
		properties = {
			titlebars_enabled = false,
			skip_decoration = true,
			ontop = true,
			floating = true,
			focus = awful.client.focus.filter,
			raise = true,
			sticky = true,
			placement = awful.placement.top_right,
		},
	})
end)

mpv Signal Listener

This is the signal listener that will fire off everytime a player is resized. The reason this is needed is if mpv resizes the player, things can get weird. So this snipped will enforce the size and location of the player at all times. The downside is that you can't manually resize the player, but that's not an issue for me.

Lua

local awful = require("awful")
local gears = require("gears")
local beautiful = require("beautiful")


-- Manipulate client shape on floating
client.connect_signal("property::floating", function(c)
	local current_layout = awful.tag.getproperty(c.first_tag, "layout")
	if c.floating and not c.maximized then
		c.shape = beautiful.client_shape_rounded
	else
		if current_layout == awful.layout.suit.max then
			c.shape = beautiful.client_shape_rectangle
		end
	end
end)


-- Set mpvs Size in stone
client.connect_signal("request::geometry", function(c, context, hints)
	if c.class == "mpv" then
		-- client.disconnect_signal("request::geometry", awful.ewmh.client_geometry_requests)
		workarea = awful.screen.focused().workarea
		c.width = workarea.width * 0.25
		c.height = workarea.height * 0.25
		awful.placement.top_right(c, { honor_workarea = true })
		c.ontop = true
	end
end)