

Qtile 0.5 released – pure Python tiling WM - tych0
https://github.com/qtile/qtile/commit/dd52b52fb8713b5b983c1a034a67bfc6fa269573

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zalew
<http://www.qtile.org/> is a more useful link than a commit diff

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olh
Nice to see the project is not dead.

Edit: I am sold, awesome job. If you want to try out, check
<http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/#installing>

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dfc
Wow, it looks great. xmonad got me hooked on tiling WMs but I had to switch to
i3 because my haskell-fu sucked. At first it did not bother me and I was
content with jgoerzen's default config plus a few minor tweaks. As I became
more knowledgeable about xmonad it was obvious that my haskell handicap was
preventing me from achieving the workflow that I wanted.

The one thing that worries me is the xrandr support borked[1] bug. Can anyone
comment on xrandr and qtile?

[1] <https://github.com/qtile/qtile/issues/32>

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burntsushi
It looks like if there is a problem, you can restart qtile and be OK. Also,
you might be able to get away with setting your monitor configuration with
xrandr _before_ starting qtile.

If you like tiling and multiple monitor support, I suggest you check out
Wingo. [1] It's a hybrid window manager written in Go, and configured in
simple INI-like files.

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

[1] - <https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo>

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tych0
That's a good point - you can script saving/restoring your windows, do your
xrandr stuff, and restart qtile and it should work just fine. Admittedly not
ideal, though.

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pyre
Criticism: I'll note that after reading both the README and the copy on the
frontpage of qtile.org, I still don't know if this is for X11, Windows or OSX.
I assume X11, but it's not really explicit.

[ Note: the screenshots give it away, but you have to click first because the
thumbnail screenshot on the front page isn't big enough to tell. ]

That said, it's nice to have a tiling WM in a language I know well. I've
fiddled with XMonad in the past, but have a very thin knowledge of Haskell (a
few times I've tried to do complex things and muddled my way through using the
compiler as my guide).

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emidln
It mentions XCB in the overview, which gives it away as X11 pretty well (at
least it did to me).

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pyre
I don't think that everyone that knows about/uses X11 knows what XCB is. I
didn't off-hand. I knew that there were C bindings for X11, but I didn't know
they were referred to as XCB.

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andrewcooke
can someone explain what the advantage of a tiling wm is? here people talk
about not using the mouse, but i don't use the mouse with kde most of the time
(maybe i am already "tiling" as as i have my xterm and browser side-by-side,
or an ide window that's full screen, and simply alt-tab).

also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible, with
things like huge clocks, apparently because of horizontal/vertical stacking.
are there any that are flexible enough to look attractive?

finally, can i still use applications like amarok (the kde music player) in a
tiling window manager? what about all the kde infrastructure for sound
management (phonon etc) that amarok depends on? what starts that? does the
tiling window manager run in kde?

sorry for probably clueless questions. have used linux/x for decades, but
always with a "normal" wm.

update - this seems to have some answers (not great - i am starting to think
it's mainly a group signalling thing, which is cool - i am writing this
wearing a band t-shirt..) [http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a-
tiling-window...](http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a-tiling-
window-manager)

edit: another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate
windows from a vm?

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zalew
> also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible

the explanation on the rat poison page <http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/>
probably says everything about that.

tilers are not for decoration, they are for functionality and performance.
there is an option to replace xfwm with xmonad in xfce to get good tiling and
save the looks, but I didn't have time to try it.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722201> (btw that x-tile app is crap)

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andrewcooke
i'm sorry, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to use one, unless you have
a really slow machine. it just says that they use few resources and you don't
need to use the mouse. but i have a decent machine and, as i said, already
alt-tab between windows.

i realise appearance isn't everything, but if you had the choice of dating two
people, otherwise equal, one who was ugly and the other cute, what would you
choose?

i also realise i may be coming across as a troll (that wasn't my intention,
but your reply seemed to wilfully ignore what i asked). i really am interested
in what the advantages of one of these would be (since if the reason is
convincing i would try one).

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zalew
> wilfully ignore what i asked

I answered what I knew the answer for. I have no idea about kde and its apps,
never used it, as I said, I use Xfce. And on my laptop I use Openbox. On both
of them I too switch between desktops/windows with my keyboard. I tried
AwesomeWM once for a moment (very hyped recently), but pure tile seems too
crazy for me and by their nature those wms are very raw out of the box (read:
nothing there. DIY).

> i'm sorry, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to use one, unless you
> have a really slow machine.

It's one of those things where there isn't one true answer, it's just a matter
of preference - good looking 'desktop metaphor' or highly script-customizable
tiles. There should probably be some religious battles about it in the deep
meanders of the interwebs. The most flagship usage of decent tilers is those
sysadmin dudes with 40 terminals on 5 monitors rotating them all around
between a dozen of workspaces like mad. I use 4 to 7 workspaces tops on a
single monitor in xfce and openbox, while f.ex. awesomewm sets default
workspaces to 9, I think that says pretty much about the workflow of the
tiling userbase.

tldr: idk, whatever floats your boat.

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SoftwareMaven
I've been thinking about trying a tiling window manager, since I despise using
the touchpad on my ThinkPad and Emacs and my MBA's touchpad have spoiled me on
never really moving my hands from the keyboard. I thought about xmonad but now
is not the time I want to spend diving into Haskell.

This seems like a great middle ground. I'll be trying it this week.

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mercurial
XMonad is very good, but is only a window manager (eg, no toolbar), so you
need to fiddle with configuration files to integrate it with a third-party
toolbar (eg, xmobar or taffybar). You can try awesome, which I found much
easier to use out-of-the-box. It's fairly mature by now, features a clickable
toolbar, and a library of additional widgets.

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piffey
I avoided qtile awhile ago because of performance issues I read about when
compared with awesome and xmonad. Anyone know about a change on that front? As
someone who spends a lot of time in python I would prefer a python tiling wm,
but I cannot find any performance benchmarks with the latest versions of
qtile.

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tych0
What kind of performance benchmarks are you looking for? There used to be some
memory leaks in xpyb (the X interface qtile uses), but 1.3.1 addresses most of
those I believe.

Other than that, I'm not sure anyone has ever reported any performance
problems.

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urlwolf
What would be the main advantage over awesome? Does it play well with KDE? I
like the pager from kde and awesome integrates well.

I might be too invested in awesome to try it, don't have time. Shout if it's
really a quantum leap :)

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klrr
Can someone explain why they want to do this in Python and not judt C and
Xlib?

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aerique
Window managers aren't very computationally intensive so a person can use
whatever language he is most comfortable with.

Although I haven't seen a WM written in Brainfuck yet.

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klrr
Well, I think I'll try it, I need to practice some python.

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hanula
dwm is my favorite so far, does the job very well, but as python dev I should
give qtile more attention again. Looks interesting.

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mamcx
Is this only for command-line guis?

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randallma
No, it runs on top of an X server like any other desktop environment (GNOME,
KDE, etc)

