Qtile - A Powerful and Flexible Window Manager You Should Try!

Well I finally decided to face down one of the window managers that I struggled to configure last year. I faced the task with more than a little trepidation, but I needn't have worried. All these months of fiddling with TWM config files has obviously done wonders. This time I found
the process relatively straightforward.
In this video I just showcase my latest creation. As always, feel free to go to my gitlab page if you want to try the config file.
I hope you enjoy the video :-)
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Ramble On!

[@DistroTube]

It's so sad to see this guy that just can't stop window manager hopping. I know the pain of this all too well. :D

[@OldTechBloke]

Ha ha, you started it all DT

[@zeocamo]

@@OldTechBloke that is why i stoped on bspwm, i just did not like the manual tiling in i3, BSPWM as you know is hybrid(for them who dont know)

[@zeocamo]

@@douglasward718 that is a good one, but everyone know that BSPWM is the best

[@plasmalife5532]

Ah,,😂😂😂

[@francescovolpini]

@@zeocamo laughs in xmonad, qtile and dwm

[@CdriKSchiff]

That independent workspaces for screen is what sets me apart from full desktop environments and keeps me in E. Just the perfect spot between WM and DE. Nice work mate!

[@taidee]

Wow OTB, another great explainer from you. I've been a resident of Qtile for a while and I also favor "monadtall". And I like how it keeps the original first window being main window instead of shifting it as new windows open, which is what Xmonad does.

[@smisheduprog2475]

Your config file was a suitable starting point for me on this tiling window manager journey, thank you so much!

[@OldTechBloke]

You're welcome!

[@deechvogt1589]

Steve, took me a while to get through this video, just me, running errands today, but I really like how you solved the you start-up issues, simply brilliant. And you saved the surprising news for last LIVE STREAM tomorrow at 3PM your time which I just checked is 10AM my time. So see you for brunch tomorrow Steve!

[@OldTechBloke]

See you tomorrow mate

[@4932gb]

Well done! You have a very nice calm delivery, easy to follow.

[@OldTechBloke]

Glad you think so!

[@srobart]

For those who are worried about configuration, give ArcoLinux a try. They are based on Arch, but they also have several tiling WMs pre-configured out-of-the-box, in sane ways (and make it super easy to install/try new ones with their tweak tool). It allowed me to learn AwesomeWM in a much faster way than I otherwise would have been able to, if I had been forced to start from scratch. They also pre-configure the lain widgets, which will make your life easier if you want to control layouts, volume, media players and use various things on your bar. Their lead dev also has a youtube channel where he explains how to do just about anything you could ever want to do (Erik Dubois).

[@xwinglover]

Erik is a legend

[@umka7536]

Thanks a lot for this video! I started with Xmonad but multi-screen + Xmobar integration is a bit of a pain. And I started to play with Qtile and I like it a lot, Python is really easier to get familiar with. And because of Python it is much easy to customize and add your own things into it.

[@OldTechBloke]

You are welcome!

[@heartwork1000]

I was always i3, but once i got qtile configured how i liked it i found it a very good experience. Good video

[@sabinoramirez2600]

I have never played a video at 2x speed and found it still to be too slow. Regardless, amazing content thank you for posting!

[@Flippy_Nips]

This wm is the closest thing we'll ever get to wmfs2. It's actually an improvement.

[@ruhruhruhruhruheisjsij]

Dude I love your video's! Keep it up, I've been learning so much from you. You earned a sub from me for sure

[@zeddie4153]

oh my.. Qtile! used this a lot before switching to DWM.

[@zeocamo]

then you only got 1 switch left ..... to BSPWM :)

[@tandeshmukh]

I love qtile so much! My only gripe, and the reason I left it, is that resizing the master stack ration is a pain. I especially wanted to be able to resize the stacked layout ratio.

[@adamu6941]

I always said to myself that it is up to the machine to put itself at the "height" of the man and not the other way around, and seeing so much hype around these WMs is a good example. But even when choosing one I think it's more useful to learn to use QTile because python is one of the more affordable and popular languages, which makes the time spent on it more and more sustainable.

[@plasmalife5532]

Goood inspection

[@aidanomalley8607]

i was happy with linux mint for 8 years. Loving arch cinnamon for last 2 years.... developed cult like madness xmonad the last 2 months.

[@simpan197]

I agree about Xmonad, it took me a week to get it to where I wanted, and then I realized it didn't work with jetbrains. But I assume you've been playing around with it recently now since you asked for help in the Reddit forums. Nice video as always!

[@OldTechBloke]

Cheers

[@JazzMachine77]

qtitle seems really nice to me since I'm programming in Python for 20-ish years now. I'm currently using i3wm and it works fine however I think the configuration is quite odd and configuring the WM with Python is a big plus to me.

[@jmartin3376]

Great video as usual. I tried qtile for the first time today and I must say that qtiles documentation appears a bit incomplete to me when it comes to handling multiple monitors. Having used bspwm for quite some time now, I find qtiles way of handling multihead just confusing and the documentation on the homepage really isn't a big help

[@OldTechBloke]

Yes I fully agree. It was one of things that put me off initially. It’s working well now but it’s been a case of trial and error

[@riseabove3082]

Looks good, been wanting to try QTile but I just don't see a good enough reason to change from i3-gaps. I have mine already configured with Polybar and using Alacritty and I don't see any benefit from moving to QTile just to spend hours and headaches to configure something to work and look just like my current TWM. I know i3 is more of a manual WM but I have no problems with it. Low memory usage and looks good and I know how to easily change things around to keep it interesting.

[@ChaiBronz]

Whyd you move away from bspwm? Your setup looked great.

[@OldTechBloke]

It’s still installed but I wanted to experiment and found I preferred dynamic tilers. That said bspwm is the wm that moved me away from DEs

[@Jeff_Seely]

Godspeed and may you rest in peace in God's love and grace.

[@peterjansen4826]

OldTechBloke, so DT also got you on Alacritty. :) I use it too. Previous week I had to reinstall Arch, GRUB broke after I updated the BIOS of my motherboard and I couldn't fix it even though everything seemed ok. The great thing about Alacritty: I just copy the config file and it works exactly how I like it, as long as the used font is installed. You really notice that it is a bit faster because it uses GPU-acceleration. One little problem of Alacritty: it is really difficult with indentation. One space too much or too little...They could fix that by just removing all the spaces at the beginning of a line and interpret the config-file based on that.

[@OldTechBloke]

Lol yes I’ve been using alacritty for about a year now. It works well for what I need it for and can honestly say I haven’t noticed the indenting issue

[@peterjansen4826]

@@OldTechBloke Put the size of the font one position to the left or the right and save the file when the terminal is open, you will notice it. :) I use DT his colors, I did change the font (he used a non-monospace font which is a problem) and I added transparency. I like it this way, DT has a good taste in colors for the text.

[@Ax4400]

can you run different apps simultaneously in small work spaces on the one big screen? I just made an iso of garuda QTile, you try that one? I can't seem to install slackware on my new PC build. What's the difference between QTile & i3?

[@SwiatLinuksa]

@,OTB Big thank you for that explanation and your dotfiles on git? I just move from Manjaro gnome to Arco with Qtile ,(removed all xfce ) and can start learn wm ;)) DT files didnt work properly for me. Yours do ;)) Cheers

[@OldTechBloke]

You’re welcome

[@chezz4878]

Great video! I don't see the qtile files on github ... do you plan on putting them up there? :)

[@OldTechBloke]

They're all on my gitlab page gitlab.com/OldTechBloke/dotfiles/-/tree/master/.config/qtile

[@chezz4878]

@@OldTechBloke Thank you sir!

[@cfischer691]

You aren't using dmenu with qtile? Any reason why not?

[@OldTechBloke]

I have dmenu as well but I prefer the look and feel of rofi

[@hussainkhorakiwala517]

Yay, finally my fav window manager... First BTW

[@brovoice6822]

I used it on Arch and I really liked it. Tried to install it on Void Linux from source as it's not available in the repo anymore. It just doesn't want to work.

[@OldTechBloke]

Can you install it using pip?

[@brovoice6822]

@@OldTechBloke Yes I tried with pip as well. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I followed guide on qtile.org documentation.

[@HeCodes2Much]

Why didn't you just put a desktop file into the .config/autostart/ folder that will always run no matter what window manager you run and had the qtile.desktop how it was by default

[@OldTechBloke]

To be honest mate I didn’t think of that

[@aniislive6800]

the emoji icons are not showing properly which font needed, I tried with UbuntuMono Nerd Font, Hack, Monospace, sans fonts not worked

[@OldTechBloke]

Try the google emoji fonts

[@symbianflo]

Just funny to me, never saw you using mc... 🤔 How come? Ps nice video even if I'm more for desktop , for fun, and TTY for productivity

[@OldTechBloke]

Mc?

[@symbianflo]

@@OldTechBloke Sorry my bad,... midnight commander www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mc/ midnight-commander.org/ PS: I would suggest darkfar theme...:D

[@Stephen-yd7ce]

i tried qtile and it was going pretty well until I opened Gimp and tried to export an image. The dialogs kept getting pushed behind the main window. After messing with it to try and solve the problem, I did some searching on the web and found it was a known problem. The date on the bug report was pretty old and still not fixed, so I went back to awesomewm. Anyone else have this issue?

[@OldTechBloke]

Haven’t had the issue so far

[@andrewpalm2103]

I tried Qtile some time ago and vaguely remember the problem you mention on popup windows. I got it working pretty well, but like you I eventually moved on to another WM. I also thought the Qtile documentation was a bit difficult to understand on some topics. I had to search the web to find useful examples, as well. I can't really hold this against Qtile, as it is true of many tiling WMs. The combination of my hardware and use cases doesn't really benefit from tiling, except for a simple two-pane split, which I can get in Xfce and other DEs..

[@ribosomerocker]

@@andrewpalm2103 I agree with you on the documentation part, it is very annoying on how the documentation works. I am currently on qtile and it is working rather well, but it is annoying as there are little to no resources, especially with polybar. I tried dwm, i3, awesome, etc. And they all didn't feel as good to me as qtile, which I really liked because I am fluent in python and it is very easy for me to configure. I feel like qtile is in my opinion, is very good just because of the configuration file and the tons of objects the main library has. I didn't really try bspwm or any other wm yet, I can see myself moving from this, but this one is the first ever that kind of moved out of my way. This comment is also reaching out to you to give me wm suggestions because I believe I'm starting to run out of mainstream window managers, lol.

[@andrewpalm2103]

@@ribosomerocker Heh. Well, my favorite tiling WM has been Herbstluft. I used it with a modification of the dzen-based panel example it came with, plus stalonetray. Stalonetry was fiddly to set up, but then worked well. It can be set up with xfce panel instead. I found Herbstluft to be quite natural for me. You might want to give it a try.

[@ribosomerocker]

@@andrewpalm2103 Sounds good! I'll try it out.

[@zedrobot5864]

I used Qtile a lot the reason why I left Qtile it because u limited in widgets for example the weather widget is broken in Qtile and the windows swithers is kinda annoying but over all it pretty good wm but now I'm dwm user

[@Robertass2000]

also i found cpu widget update glitch on qtile. dwm has issue with Asiatic fonts size inconsitence in title bar using hidpi screens. Still using dwm though with low dpi screen :)

[@ForrestRhoads]

Light balance seems off... Dark on the left, light on the right. Qtile seems interesting, but I have so much invested in Awesome that I can't see switching to another without some obvious benefit to aim for. I don't see that Qtile offers anything that Awesome doesn't.

[@OldTechBloke]

Yes it’s really about personal preference here Forrest. As for the light balance, yes it’s not right yet. I’m still playing with it

[@peterjansen4826]

I still use dwm, so far I only have one big complaint. I installed the attachaside patch, it works for two windows but as soon as you open the third window the program which was in the master-space gets pushed to the slave-space and the 2nd program which you opened in the slave-space gets pushed to the master-space. It doesn't make sense to me, I prefer the program which is in the masterspace to remain in the masterspace. I can read all the C-code but I don't know if I am smart enough to hack it myself, I might try it sometime. My problem with xmonad is that there is no hide-function for the panel and systemtray, you could start and kill it all the time but that is more clumsy. I don't see myself use Qtile, it uses Python, generally that is not good for performance (interpreter vs compiled code).

[@OldTechBloke]

Dwm will probably remain my favourite but I’m impressed with qtile so far

[@benlemon1337]

FWIW, I've had attachaside for a while and my build doesn't do that. It sounds like a functionality conflict with another one of the "attach" patches (or any patch that modifies the stack ordering)

[@peterjansen4826]

@@benlemon1337 I only have a few basic patches: attachaside, pertag, systemtray, rotatestack and fibonacci. Are you 100% certain that whichever program is in your main-window remains there as from the third program that you open? I will look into it, see if there is a conflict. It is not a big deal but it is a little bit annoying having to rotate the stack more than what should be required. Fortunately doing patches goes fast so I can easily start over. :)

[@benlemon1337]

@@peterjansen4826 Yeah, the third window spawns in the upper right and all new clients continue stacking on that side. Master doesn't move (i just double checked). You might want to inspect the diff and see if anything looks missing/out of place in dwm.c. It could also be a duplicate keybinding. Those other patches shouldn't interfere - I have most of them.

[@peterjansen4826]

@@benlemon1337 Thanks. If necessary I just repeat the patches one by one and verify after every patch that it works as desired.

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

Well all I can say is wow! :-D Not really... HAHaHa... Great video too! I have DWM and Qtile on my list. Not even gotta try Haskell... I know a little Python and I want to try DWM I think I can figure it out. I have been using SpectrWm for months now and play with Awesome a bit now and then... Linux Dabblers been after me to try his DWM build and I do intend to, thing just keep getting in the way. Like this new issue with a key sig for this AUR repo I use that worked a few days ago and now NOT!... :-( I tried the Archwiki fix they posted but still no joy. Tried the Keys fix in the EndeavourOS forum and Nope did not fix it... :-( Got to love Arch, always something! 6 systems that I can not update without disabling the their repo... Lol Wating for a email... Anyway Some great stuff, will give this a go in time OTB, you can bet on that! I will be there for the live show tomorrow! Hay I'm a Retired Geek, what else do I have to do! :-D Thanks for the video! LLAP

[@OldTechBloke]

Ha ha, see you tomorrow Bruce. By the way, my build of dwm is up on gitlab as well if you ever want to give it a go

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

@@OldTechBloke HaHaHa Okie Dokie... Lol LLAP

[@arkvsi8142]

I use KDE BTW

[@Newtube_Channel]

Is OTB a TWM?

[@OldTechBloke]

No, but there's an idea :-)

[@skylinecyber3538]

Linux sucks from distro hopping to windows manager hopping.