Avant Window Navigator

Avant Window Navigator
A Screenshot of a development version of AWN
Original author(s)	Neil J. Patel
Developer(s)	Awn-core Team
Stable release	0.4.2 / November 27, 2013; 11 years ago (2013-11-27)
Repository	github.com/p12tic/awn
Written in	C, Python, Vala
Platform	Unix-like
Available in	English
Type	Application dock Linux on the desktop
License	GPL v2 (dock) LGPL v2.1 (library) CC BY-SA 3.0 (unported) (images)
Website	https://github.com/p12tic/awn

Avant Window Navigator (abbreviated AWN or Awn) is a dock-like bar for Linux, which sits on an edge of a user's screen and tracks open windows. Instead of representing open windows as buttons or segments on a bar, it uses large icons on a translucent background to increase readability and add visual appeal. The program was created by Neil J. Patel.

Both the appearance and functionality of Avant Window Navigator may be customized, and plugins and applets are available, such as to display the progress of a download in Mozilla Firefox or to control a music player like Rhythmbox.^[1] The plugins use the D-Bus IPC system, and applets can be written in C, Python or Vala. A sister project, AWN Extras, is a collection of community-contributed applets and plugins. Releases are usually kept in sync with AWN.

One of the major requirements to run older versions of Avant Window Navigator is a compositing window manager. At least version 0.4.0-2 in the Debian repos has either Metacity, xcompmgr, Compiz, xfwm4, KWin or Mutter as a dependency.^[2]

Therefore, the user was required to install a compositor,^[3] which could tax performance on low-end systems. Some alternatives were to use a lightweight desktop environment such as Xfce, which has a compositing manager since version 4.2.0, or to enable compositing in Metacity when using GNOME.^[4] However, support for non-composited environments is available in version 0.4.0.^[5][6]

• Dock (computing)
• Docky
• Kicker (KDE)
• GNOME Panel

Notes

• Jack Wallen (12 Aug 2009) Avant Window Navigator: OS X-like dock on Linux desktop, ghacks.net
• Dmitri Popov (Jan 30, 2009) Managing Tasks with Avant Window Navigator, Linux Magazine online
• Jonathan Roberts (21 July 2007) Gnome Panel Mania, Free Software Magazine column

Wikimedia Commons has media related to awn.

• awn on GitHub - Home of AWN project - Maintained by Povilas Kanapickas (reporting of bugs and issues not permitted, last activity 2014-06-11)
• Avant Window Navigator at Launchpad - Project moved to GitHub
• AWN Wiki contains, among other things, installation instructions and a list of FAQs - Site Unknown (as of 2014-12-13)
• AWN Forums - Access to server forbidden (as of 2014-12-13)
• Avant Window Navigator (AWN) Mac OS like Dock in openSUSE at susegeek.com (posting dated 2008-08-02)
• Neil J. Patel's Blog - Blog no longer active (last entry dated 2011-06-12)
• Planet AWN, an aggregation of the developers' weblogs - Site Unknown (as of 2014-12-13)