My Time with Qtile

My Time With Qtile

the "python bad lol" culture really needs to stop because its a great general purpose language.

Resistance is Futile.

I've hopped DE's and WM's more than i'd like to admit

Yet, outside of Awesome, i never felt comfy in them, even when i customised/patched them to my liking. i always found myself coming back to Qtile over and over again with every DE and WM i'd try out (and susequently remove after going back) so i just stuck with it.

So i'm Back to Qtile.

But what does Qtile do that others don't?

As far as i know, its one of, if not the only Dynamic TWM fully written and configued in Python. Making it really, REALLY easy to hack on and customise to exactly how you want it to be. The Documentation, again, outside of the likes of Xmonad and Awesome, is some of the best i've seen for a TWM, everything you could want and need to know is clearly documented and even goes into detail on how to extend the WM with your own code (you can make custom widgets, layouts, etc. to suit what you want Qtile to display).

But… Python? why?

Not everything on planet earth has to be slaved over for hours and hours coding in C, seriously. C has its uses, yes. but for a general purpose language? the speed benefits are very, very negligable, especially with something like a WINDOW MANAGER, which in laymans terms displays windows at a set of coordinates and manages their positions in relation to each other.

would i use an interpreted language on low spec hardware where every optimisation matters (like idk… the n3DS/2DS? the PSVITA?, a Raspberry PI?)? No, i'd take C all day every day since in that use case C will ALWAYS be faster and much less resource intensive.

but in an age where our phones are as powerful as some laptops from a decade ago, and our desktops can literally emulate how light works in REAL TIME. i don't think it really matters what you use, as long as what you do use makes you happy. Rant over… kinda?

Trying out Qtile

if you wanna try Qtile, and run Arch, (on Debian/Ubuntu you need to install from source, instructions can be found here, you'd also need to manually make the .desktop file so you can choose it in your login manager) you can download it from the repos, it comes with a default config so you can use it straight away if you want to. though if you want something a bit more customised, either my config or DT's config are good places to start, you could also check the qtile examples repo for some other ideas.

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