The Qtile Window Manager: A Python-Powered Tiling Experience

Summary

📝 Important This article was originally written in Dec 2021, but I’ve updated it to showcase my new config. I’ve been an avid user of XFCE for a very long time. I’m fond of its lightweight nature, and I feel productive in it. But when I first discovered tiling window managers, I was mind-blown. I’ve wanted to use one forever. My first experience with one was a few years ago, before I understood how Linux window managers worked. I couldn’t yet wrap my head around the fact that you could install more than one window manager and choose what you wanted during login. I think I’ve grown since then. I faintly remember trying to install i3wm, the most famous tiling window manager at the time. I think I was taken aback by the black screen, and more so with the mouse pointer which just said X. A year or so ago, I came across DistroTube’s Youtube Channel, where he talks about xmonad, the tiling window manager that’s written in Haskell. While I’ve been wanting to learn Haskell for a very long time, my career trajectory hasn’t afforded me the chance to learn it so far. I’ve since moved jobs and completely shifted to Linux everywhere. I no longer want to use a non-linux machine ever again. I’m sure there’s a whole blog article about how much of a Linux person I’ve become in the past year or so, somewhere in me. Last week, I came across dt’s video on Qtile, the tiling window manager written entirely in Python. Now that was truly enticing. I’m adept enough in Python to be able to manage complex configurations all on my own. And after skimming through the documentation, I spent a day modularizing the default qtile config since the default config gives me goosebumps, and not in a good way. In this article, I’ll describe what I did, and how I went about it. Installing Qtile# I decided to abstract away the entire configuration so that it doesn’t live in my dotfiles repository. I wanted to create a python library for myself so that it would have a bunch of utilities for my own consumpti...