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Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

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Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#31

Post by mongrol »

linguafranca wrote: post #28
krick wrote: post #19

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…

In my experience, window manager authors don't usually care if some other program looks bad. There's no real unity, and their attitude is just "not my program, not my problem".

It's the correct attitude. They are not responsible for you having the nouse to install a GTK Theme application like lxappearance and fixing how your Firefox looks.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#32

Post by dmpayton »

robertfw wrote: post #6

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.

I started with Awesome in 2009 and switched to Qtile about a year later. Python is what I do all day every day, and it's really useful to be able to customize my environment in my favorite language. The other plus of Qtile being in Python is that it's much easier for me to contribute back to the project itself.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#33

Post by z0r »

krick wrote: post #19

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…

Chrome looks about the same everywhere, emacs is customized within itself and I turn off all the window dressing on the terminals I use (no menus, no scrollbar, nada). Since that sums up 99% of my typical day to day computer usage there's no visual downside to xmonad for me. What looks even better than customized widgets (and I've tweaked emacs theme and the terminal settings to my taste long ago) are nice layouts that arrange all my windows in more or less logical ways automatically. Few things look as bad to me as a mess of randomly sized windows partially overlapping each other!

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#34

Post by freshhawk »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #14
freshhawk wrote: post #9

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.

What made you switch? Xmonad's unified workspaces across monitors is my favorite feature.

Ease of configuration tweaks and number of plugin contributors. And I can write Haskell code well enough, I've even had some in production, but it was still a pain to try and navigate the types in the configuration, especially trying to get two separate plugins/libs to work together.

Mostly it was the plugin community, which is much larger for awesome and the shared philosophy of the community is very unix-y/small tools focused which is great and makes up for the copy/paste script-kiddy side of it.

Damn do I miss proper monitor support though, luckily I did kinda keep a separation between my main monitor and secondary naturally so it's not as painful for me as it would be for some.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#35

Post by freshhawk »

burntsushi wrote: post #11
freshhawk wrote: post #9

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.

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

I'll have to try it out, nice excuse to get beyond my toy program Go experience as well.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#36

Post by freshhawk »

ibrahima wrote: post #16
freshhawk wrote: post #9

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.

Hmm, so what is it about Xmonad that you like exactly? Reading the FAQ I see this: > When xmonad starts, workspace 1 is on screen 1, workspace 2 is on screen 2, etc. When switching workspaces to one that is already visible, the current and visible workspaces are swapped. I actually like how Awesome does things but I can see how it might be nice to have one set of screens. Though I feel like you could probably script…

Actually this one is not an easily scriptable thing. I dove deep on this one.

The main use case I miss is this one. I work with two monitors, either a 30" and a sideways 24" or a 30" and my laptop screen.

Gvim, terminal windows, etc on the primary and web browser on the secondary. Works fine in xmonad and awesome.

But then I have something unusual, maybe I have a screen with a mitm proxy and a detached chromium devtools or console and a repl all layed out nicely to debug something. Aha, I think I found it, let me look at the code ... shit, I layed these out on my primary.

With xmonad I can throw that whole screen over to the secondary, might have to adjust a bit because of the resolution difference but that's way easier than having to move each app over individually which just completely breaks flow.

I tried to script it but it just ends up a mess because you do have to move each application individually and they always require a lot of fiddling.

Lua is very easy to mess around with, my first day with awesome I couldn't find a battery monitor that I liked and that worked with my laptop so I just wrote one that's perfect. Took about 2 hours since I had never written Lua before. The docs were quite good.

Xmonad should take note, have some actual documentation. Auto-generated garbage consisting solely of type signatures doesn't count.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#37

Post by freshhawk »

tych0 wrote: post #24
freshhawk wrote: post #9

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.

Qtile has a set of virtual desktops ("groups" in qtile lingo), and you can display any group on any monitor, rather than having one group that maps to your pair of monitors. I find this behavior very handy. EDIT: to clarify, it functions in essentially the same fundamental way xmonad's does.

Excellent, between that and being written in Python I will definitely be trying this out.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#38

Post by freshhawk »

sprobertson wrote: post #18
freshhawk wrote: post #9

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.

Interesting, I preferred awesome's model because it allows you to mix and match contexts.

That I will definitely miss if I moved away. Maybe it's just my years with XMonad but I don't use it that often, I mostly only want to move one window around, rarely groups.

The only time I move entire groups is to push it to the other monitor which is the one thing it can't do.

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#39

Post by stormbrew »

krick wrote: post #19

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…

You can make things look pretty decent by running some kind of a settings daemon so that apps that follow xsettings Do The Right Thing. Either run one from one of the DEs, or find a thing called xsettingsd that's more standalone but a bit more painful to use. But I actually like it better since it puts the settings in a text file, and it doesn't also hijack shortcuts and the like (like gnome-settings-manager does).

Re: Qtile – A hackable tiling window manager written in Python

#40

Post by sry_not4sale »

robertfw wrote: post #6

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.

Qtile is great. I've been using it for years, after xmonad and awesome previously.
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