6 ms·

Qtile 0.5 released – pure Python tiling WM

72 points by tych0 14y ago

zalew 14y ago
http://www.qtile.org/ http://www.qtile.org/ is a more useful link than a commit diff
olh 14y ago
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 http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/#installing
mamcx 14y ago
Is this only for command-line guis?
- randallma 14y ago
  No, it runs on top of an X server like any other desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc)
indigo_daddy 14y ago
tiling omg boring
dfc 14y ago
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 https://github.com/qtile/qtile/issues/32
- tych0 14y ago
  I can comment to say that nobody has really looked at it, so it's unfortunately probably still broken :-(. Patches are definitely welcome, though!
- burntsushi 14y ago
  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 https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo
  - tych0 14y ago
    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.
- mharrison 14y ago
  (Author of said bug and ratiotile layout, and battery widget). Nope, not ideal, but I've been using qtile with multiple monitors for 3+ years now. Restarting qtile isn't that bad though because you don't lose your windows, just the layout of them. And because I have my most common layout first, it turns out not to bug me. For me it just feels right[0], even with its warts. I'm glad Tycho and others are pushing it forward! I miss it everytime I use a mac or other machines. Plus the kids think at my child's elementary school think my computer is "awesome"! :) [0]- http://hairysun.com/About/ http://hairysun.com/About/
hanula 14y ago
dwm is my favorite so far, does the job very well, but as python dev I should give qtile more attention again. Looks interesting.
pyre 14y ago
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).
- emidln 14y ago
  It mentions XCB in the overview, which gives it away as X11 pretty well (at least it did to me).
  - pyre 14y ago
    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.
- burntsushi 14y ago
  Are there tiling window managers for Windows or Mac?
  - pyre 14y ago
    They are not true window managers, but IIRC there are at least 1 or 2 programs that allow you to do a limited amount of tiling on OSX. I could see someone writing a program for OSX that listened for window events and did resizing, and then calling is a 'tiling WM' since it was modeled after such for X11. Maybe that's just me over-thinking.
- tych0 14y ago
  Hmm, ok. I guess I hadn't even really considered that this was a mistake people would make. Thanks for the input!
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
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.
- mercurial 14y ago
  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.
- flexd 14y ago
  I use nwm at work, it's quite nice.https://github.com/mixu/nwm https://github.com/mixu/nwm
- mharrison 14y ago
  Been using qtile on my TP for 3 years. At work I'm running it in a vm on a MBP with my nice unicomp keyboard. If you like Python and tiling, I'm convinced this is the way to go. Xmonad is cool but requires Haskell (not that that is good or bad, it's just the way it is) and I'm already proficient in Python.
klrr 14y ago
Can someone explain why they want to do this in Python and not judt C and Xlib?
- aerique 14y ago
  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.
  - klrr 14y ago
    Well, I think I'll try it, I need to practice some python.
piffey 14y ago
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.
- mharrison 14y ago
  I used Awesome for about a year or so before qtile and haven't noticed any performance differences.
- tych0 14y ago
  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.
andrewcooke 14y ago
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-manager http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a-tiling-window... edit: another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?
- zalew 14y ago
  > also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible the explanation on the rat poison page http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722201 (btw that x-tile app is crap)
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    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).
urlwolf 14y ago
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 :)

72 points by tych0 14y ago

zalew 14y ago

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

olh 14y ago

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 http://docs.qtile.org/en/latest/#installing

mamcx 14y ago

Is this only for command-line guis?

randallma 14y ago
No, it runs on top of an X server like any other desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, etc)

indigo_daddy 14y ago

tiling omg boring

dfc 14y ago

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 https://github.com/qtile/qtile/issues/32

tych0 14y ago
I can comment to say that nobody has really looked at it, so it's unfortunately probably still broken :-(. Patches are definitely welcome, though!
burntsushi 14y ago
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 https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo
- tych0 14y ago
  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.
mharrison 14y ago
(Author of said bug and ratiotile layout, and battery widget). Nope, not ideal, but I've been using qtile with multiple monitors for 3+ years now. Restarting qtile isn't that bad though because you don't lose your windows, just the layout of them. And because I have my most common layout first, it turns out not to bug me. For me it just feels right[0], even with its warts. I'm glad Tycho and others are pushing it forward! I miss it everytime I use a mac or other machines. Plus the kids think at my child's elementary school think my computer is "awesome"! :) [0]- http://hairysun.com/About/ http://hairysun.com/About/

hanula 14y ago

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

pyre 14y ago

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).

emidln 14y ago
It mentions XCB in the overview, which gives it away as X11 pretty well (at least it did to me).
- pyre 14y ago
  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.
burntsushi 14y ago
Are there tiling window managers for Windows or Mac?
- pyre 14y ago
  They are not true window managers, but IIRC there are at least 1 or 2 programs that allow you to do a limited amount of tiling on OSX. I could see someone writing a program for OSX that listened for window events and did resizing, and then calling is a 'tiling WM' since it was modeled after such for X11. Maybe that's just me over-thinking.
tych0 14y ago
Hmm, ok. I guess I hadn't even really considered that this was a mistake people would make. Thanks for the input!

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

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.

mercurial 14y ago
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.
flexd 14y ago
I use nwm at work, it's quite nice.https://github.com/mixu/nwm https://github.com/mixu/nwm
mharrison 14y ago
Been using qtile on my TP for 3 years. At work I'm running it in a vm on a MBP with my nice unicomp keyboard. If you like Python and tiling, I'm convinced this is the way to go. Xmonad is cool but requires Haskell (not that that is good or bad, it's just the way it is) and I'm already proficient in Python.

klrr 14y ago

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

aerique 14y ago
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.
- klrr 14y ago
  Well, I think I'll try it, I need to practice some python.

piffey 14y ago

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.

mharrison 14y ago
I used Awesome for about a year or so before qtile and haven't noticed any performance differences.
tych0 14y ago
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.

andrewcooke 14y ago

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-manager http://superuser.com/questions/52082/why-use-a-tiling-window... edit: another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?

zalew 14y ago
> also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible the explanation on the rat poison page http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722201 (btw that x-tile app is crap)
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  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).

urlwolf 14y ago

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 :)