[eureka]

Originally Posted by twobob

I believe there was a default keybinding CMD + R (or something) that causes awesome to reload it's configuration while running...

Another gem to be dug up perhaps one day. *makes notes*

It's not default keybinding, it should be set explicitly (to invoke function awesome.restart).

I came to something different but also useful for this case (using overrided rc.lua):

package.path = "/var/tmp/root/.config/awesome/?.lua;" .. package.path
dofile("/etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua")

local lipcH, errNum, errMsg = lipc.init("com.lab126.winmgr.extra")
if not lipcH then
  log ("!!!!!!!!!!!failed to init lipc " .. tostring(errNum) .. ", " .. errMsg)
else
  lipcH:register_string_property("restart", "w").listener = awesome.restart
  awesome.add_signal("exit", lipcH:close)
end

Then just:

$ lipc-set-prop com.lab126.winmgr.extra restart now

Instead "now" any string value could be used.

Unfortunately, every restart creates additional /bin/sh -c awesome process hanging around. And according to awesome sources, it's by design:

Spoiler:

void
awesome_restart(void)
{
    awesome_atexit(true);
    a_exec(globalconf.argv);
}

void
a_exec(const char *cmd)
{
    static const char *shell = NULL;

    if(!shell && !(shell = getenv("SHELL")))
        shell = "/bin/sh";

    execl(shell, shell, "-c", cmd, NULL);
}