Awesome manages windows dynamically in floating or tiled layouts. It is primarily targeted at power users, developers, and all those dealing with everyday computing tasks and looking for fine-grained control over their graphical environment.

It is highly extensible and scriptable via the Lua programming language, providing an easy-to-use and very well documented API to configure its behavior.

awesome uses tags instead of workspaces, which gives better flexibility in displaying windows, and can be entirely keyboard-driven, not needing a mouse. It also supports multi-headed configurations; uses XCB instead of Xlib for better performance; implements many freedesktop standards; and can be controlled over D-Bus from awesome-client.