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This document is an ''advanced user'' manual for Ion, the X11 window manager, and version 3 specifically. It is an attempt attempt at documenting what is in Ion's configuration files, how to configure Ion by simple modifications to these files and how to write more complex extensions in Lua, the lightweight configuration and scripting language used by Ion.
Readers unfamiliar with Lua is advised to first glance at the Lua manual at
and perhaps some tutorial pages at the lua-users wiki:
Back in this document, first in chapter 2 some key concepts and relations are explained. These include the module system and Ion's object and class hierarchies. While it might not at first occur that knowing such things would be necessary to configure a program, this material is essential because of the object-oriented nature of most of Ion's scripting interface.
The new user, fed up with the default key bindings and eager to just quickly configure Ion to his liking may question the reasons for exposing the ''heavy'' internal OO structure in the scripting and configuration interface. I'm not the one to blame him for that. Sure it would be faster to configure Ion to everyone's liking if a simpler binding configuration interface was provided. Such an interface would, however, also be far more limited and make writing extensions more complicated and the advantages from using a real scripting language would be partly lost. One more advantage from a rich scripting and configuration interface is that it allows implementing scripts to read alternate configuration file formats, ones that could be, for example, modified by external configuration tools.
In chapter 3 the very basic Ion configuration know-how is provided. All the different configuration files and their locations are explained and instructions are given to allow the reader to configure bindings and so-called ''winprops''. Chapter 4 explains the notion of drawing engines and graphical styles and how to write new looks for Ion and more advanced aspects of Ion's scripting interface are documented in chapter 5 (a work in progress).
Finally, most of the functions provided by Ion's scripting interface are listed and documented in the Function reference in chapter 6. At the end of the document is an alphabetical listing of all these functions.