Stop MPlayer from using float in Awesome WM

Question

I understand that MPlayer calls a "configurerequest" and for that reason, completely ignores the rules of my Window Manager in Archlinux, AwesomeWM and instead of being tiled, it floats. Is there anyway to stop this from happening? Thanks!

Answer 1

You want to find the following code block, and change floating = false:

awful.rules.rules = {
    ...
    { rule = { class = "MPlayer" }, properties = { floating = false } },
    ...
}

The determine the class part, do the following in a terminal window:

% xprop | grep WM_CLASS

Then click on the window whose class name you are trying to determine. One of those wonderful UNIX things that you have to experience to believe.

Answer 2

It's also possible to toggle floating by pressing ctrl+Mod+space (in my case, and I think it's awesomes default setting, the windowskey is the Mod key)

Answer 3

I don't know anything about "configurerequest", and I think mplayer is just a normal window like any others. When reading /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua, I found MPlayer is specifically configured to be floating.

Removing that configuration in rc.lua might help.