
Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python - diogoleal
http://www.qtile.org/
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giancarlostoro
Used it before, felt like it needed a little more. Great otherwise. After
being spoiled with the Windows 8 tiling system I can't seem to appreciate
tiling managers on Linux as much as I should.

~~~
ibrahima
Are you serious? Going from tiling window managers to Windows 8, I was like...
this could be the start of something great for Windows, but it's still way too
basic for me. All Windows 8 seems to have is a split view with adjustable
split widths but that's super easy in any sane tiling WM.

Or are you talking about Windows 8 apps being "responsive" in some sense?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Well I do understand it's basic, but I like how isolated the applications can
be. For example, I can go full screen with flash on IE for Metro, or with
other "full-screen" applications and it will only hijack the portion of the
screen that is taken up by IE. I can keep using Skype or even the Desktop on
the side and multi-task. If I try to fullscreen Flash elsewhere it hijacks the
screen and even with a second monitor breaks my multi-tasking experience.

So if anyone made a Tiling Window Manager that isolates how much an
application can control, and gets rid of this config it to make it work
mentality, they would have me sold. I love having multiple desktops on Linux,
one feature that Windows lacks to this day. Their tiling, although incomplete,
it works for me and what I do.

Sorry if I offended anyone, I'm not a tiling guru, though I'd love to be. I
just prefer applications that "just work" without too much effort on the end-
users part, as opposed to getting in the way of the end-user.

~~~
wz1000
Fullscreening applications in xmonad behaves exactly as you described.

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enoch_r
Are you sure? On my machine, fullscreening, e.g., YouTube will:

\- in FF, launch a new window, showing a fraction of the frame.

\- in Chrome, replace the current window, showing a fraction of the frame.

In both cases, if I want to see the uncropped video, I have to manually switch
to Full mode. I know there are hooks[0] to change this behavior to
automatically launch a floating window (I don't use YouTube enough to bother),
but I don't think there's a way to get the behavior GP described. Is there?

[0] [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
Ma...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
ManageHelpers.html)

~~~
wz1000
I believe that that is an issue with Flash, not with xmonad. Xmonad only lets
applications draw to as much of the screen as then are alloted.

If you fullscreen Firefox, it will simply hide UI elements, not take up the
entire screen. It is not xmonads responsibility to automatically scale
applications.

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d0m
I've been using stumpwm for a while.. Apart from the "python instead of lisp",
what would be the main differences or advantages of Qtile?

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freshhawk
Does anyone know how it handles multiple monitors? I recently switched from
xmonad to awesome and while I'm happy with it, having a separate set of
screens for each monitor is pretty annoying.

It's been said before but everyone writing a tiling window manager should make
it work just like xmonad does for multiple screens, they really got it
perfect.

~~~
burntsushi
Wingo[1] (a window manager I wrote in Go) will do it right like Xmonad. Like
you, I hate how most WMs handle multiple monitors, and Xmonad got that right.

(Wingo is a true hybrid WM. I like to describe it as "Openbox meets Xmonad.")

[1] -
[https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo](https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo)

~~~
baxter001
Cool, I'll give it a go and hope that it's as helpful in getting into Go as
xmonad was haskell, nothing like having your basic interaction mechanisms bug
you to motivate you to dig into the code.

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cespare
Shameless tangentially-related-software plug: I've been working on Carlisle[0]
for a while and I use it day-to-to day. I wrote it because I don't personally
like using tiling WMs (and I'm quite happy with Xfce) but I wanted a highly
configurable way to quickly move/arrange/resize windows.

If you've used Slate[1], it's like a (much simpler) version of that, for Linux
(well, EWMH-compliant X window managers, specifically).

(Carlisle is a fairly simple wrapper on top of Andrew Gallant's amazing
xgbutil libraries[2] for Go.)

[0] [https://github.com/cespare/carlisle](https://github.com/cespare/carlisle)

[1] [https://github.com/jigish/slate](https://github.com/jigish/slate)

[2]
[http://godoc.org/github.com/BurntSushi/xgbutil](http://godoc.org/github.com/BurntSushi/xgbutil)

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robertfw
I've looked at using Qtile before, but opted to go for I3 as it seemed to be a
bit more mature. Would love to hear experiences/thoughts of anyone using this,
I would love to switch to it and be able to leverage my existing python
knowledge for customizing.

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platz
One of the things about i3 that is really compelling is the multi-monitor
support.

~~~
tych0
Qtile has multi monitor support as well. Any thoughts on why i3's is more
compelling?

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krick
I cannot get over the fact GUI apps (like firefox) look so bad on every
screenshot with tiling WMs. Is it that users just don't care or you actually
cannot make it look good ("good" is ambiguous, so let's say how it would
normally look on Xfce with standard Xubuntu theme) easily enough? I saw
something like Xmonad + Gnome 3, but it sounds pretty scary (I mean, one thing
that is good about tiling WMs is that they are normally lightweight). It might
sound funny, but it's one of the main reasons why I don't use tiling WM yet.

~~~
phaer
I guess you are referring to the GTK/QT/... theme used? Most tiling WMs don't
set one by default, but you can easily do so by using a custom .gtkrc-2.0 or
so[1]. [1] see, for example,
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Themes](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Themes)

~~~
ramLlama
This is exactly right. GNOME, KDE and other out-of-the-box solutions make sure
to set the GTK and Qt themes so that everything looks pretty. When you use a
WM (window manager) rather than a DE (desktop environment), it is up to you to
setup all the ancillary things such as themes and daemons. This is why
.xprofile exists!

Also, I find lxappearance an easy and quick way to set GTK themes via GUI
rather than having to edit the .gtkrc files for every option.

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linguafranca
Having tried to write a window manager for X, I am always impressed by anyone
who has enough followthrough to actually finish one. And I'm very eager to see
if Wayland has a nicer and more sane API than X.

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twp
What have been people's experiences with Qtile? I've used ion, Xmonad, and
more recently i3wm and would love to hear what's good and not so good about
Qtile.

~~~
baxter001
It being Python makes it easier to get the basics done, but for me there's not
a lot of value in that fact, other than setting up initial login layouts and
screens I'm not a great user of WM scripting, or at least what I do use
(setting up workspaces at login and always pushing X app to screen Y, floating
all mpv windows) there's not a lot of difficulty or difference in sticking it
in a .py file or an xmonad.hs

