Resistance Is Futile, So I'm Back In Qtile

one of my favorite telling window managers of all time is q-tile q-tile is a tiling window manager written and configured entirely in python and is just a really comfortable window manager to live in i love it because it has the same kind of function and feel as x monad so it's really easy to switch between x monet and q tile the only real difference again is the configuration in q-tile everything's configured in python of course in exmonet everything is configured in haskell but one of the things even though i say q-tile is one of my favorite telling window managers of all time i also like x-moned dwm the awesome window manager you know i'm always hopping between all these tiling window managers sometimes i even go into floating window managers like open box and live in them for a few days or even a few weeks and sometimes it's several weeks several months sometimes before i come back to some of these window managers that i've lived in before and when i come back to them my configuration is not right it's broken there's been major updates to these particular tiling window managers and my config files no longer work as i left them and that's really been the case with qtile i've been getting people opening issues on my git lab for a while now telling me hey this little thing in your qtile config doesn't work this little thing here doesn't work and i i've never really taken them that seriously as far as i need to drop everything and go fix my util config because i was living in other window managers but i've gotten enough of these reports and it's not all the same thing you know there's various parts of my configuration that are broken that here in the last two or three days i've lived in qtile and i've been working on my configuration cleaning it up and trying to correct all the errors and this is not an unusual thing with tiling window managers you do have to deal with this is that you know every few months to every few years sometimes there are major updates to these window managers and things change right some of the syntax changes as far as the programming language that the the thing is written in or whatever it is and for whatever reason you have to go in and make usually just very minor edits to your configuration it's not like you have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch so it's really it's not really a hassle or anything it's just something to be expected i've had to do this many times over the years i've had to rewrite my awesome window manager config before because uh you know syntax has changed with just the awesome libraries and the lua language and things like that i've also rewritten my qtal config at least one other time because an update basically made my old config no longer work i have rewritten my ex monad config several times so let me switch over to my desktop here and show you the updated the corrected qtile configuration uh for those of you that use my old config there are some minor aesthetic changes i did change some of the colors in the bar uh these purples and blues here for the power line effect i made them a little darker they were a little too light because it was tough to read the white text so i darkened them a little bit so that white text kind of pops out a little more also i have this python icon that i had in the bar now i used to use just the traditional python icon which is what blue and yellow in color i made it an all white icon i just thought that again for aesthetics it just fit the bar better but again these are aesthetic changes they really weren't functional in any way as far as they didn't solve any errors now the errors i'm talking about one of the first errors i started receiving reports of is the update widget so qtile has this update widget where it will tell me how many updates are available on my system because on arch systems it runs the check updates command or whatever it was that it was running figure out how many updates are available on your system and it'll print it out well that widget it was called i think it was just called pacman it was widget.pacman that pacman widget they removed it in like one of the latest versions so it stopped working and anybody that was using my configuration it stopped working for them well the qtal the guys the reason they removed the pacman widget is because they made another widget it was just a general check updates widget and you could use it for various linux distributions because not everybody's running arch right some people are running you know debian or ubuntu or whatever it happens to be so now they've made a widget that works on multiple distributions and and that's the one i needed to switch this to let me actually open up my configuration file so i can actually show you the code here some let me go to my qtile config.pi of course my config it's not myqtile.pi it's actually a readme.org but it writes out to my config dot pi so but you guys if you're not using a literate config and org mode and emax all you guys need to do is have your queue config in your home directory slash dot config slash qtile slash config.pi let me zoom in here so you guys can see a little more of what is going on in my config so let me page down and let me get down here to where the widgets start for the bar here so here's uh defining the init widgets list and let me get to this widget right here widget dot check updates is the new one that i had to change so all i needed to do that used to be widget.pacman i changed it to widget.checkupdates and then i needed to give it a couple of different values here first you need to specify your distro and for arch arch has a couple of different uh i think it's three different options for example i'm using arch underscore check updates that's meaning i use archbase distro and the command i want you to run to find my updates is the check updates command because i know that command is on my system also i can change the format as far as what it displays here so i have it display this squirrely brackets with the word updates that is the actual number of updates followed by the actual word updates so that's why i have currently 237 updates now one of the other things that was also broken in this widget and in other widgets is the mouse callback function so in qtile every widget has the ability to have a mouse callback assigned to it or multiple mouse callbacks so you can you know have the left mouse the right mouse and the middle mouse you know actually do things when you click on widgets and i had this one where if i clicked on the update widget it would run the command my terminal which is alacrity and with these flags dash e and then run the command sudo pacman syu it's basically going to open a terminal and run pacman syu so i can run an update so that's what this should be doing it was broken in my old config because the way my old config was written we had this here you had lambda space qtile colon and then q tile dot command underscore spawn and then the command you wanted to spawn well it turns out they rewrote all of these widget libraries and you can no longer do lambda and then q-tile it just needs to be lambda without q-tile and the other fix you need to do to make these callback functions work properly is in your imports you actually need to import qtil before you didn't need to import it you could just call it in the lambda now import q-tile and then of course in the actual functions themselves down here for the mouse callback just make sure you get rid of that extra q-tile that was in my config and now when i click this widget you'll see it opens a terminal that's asking for sudo password because it's trying to run sudo pacman syu so if i gave it a password here you see it's syncing the repositories and it's going to run update i'm going to decline this update since it's 237 packages now most of that is just very small haskell programs but still i don't want to take the time to run that update here on camera now i had three or four different widgets that had mouse callbacks the memory one here i think i had it open a terminal and then run h-stop and that one still works and then i think i had another one that did something let me scroll down here the memory one uh i know what it is it's the very first widget here this icon which is just this white uh python icon i set that to actually run i can't remember what i set it to run actually oh it just opens the terminal so let me click on it and it just launches the terminal i think in my old config i had it launched some kind of menu maybe d menu or rophea or something now living in qtile for the last couple of days i did notice it wasn't really an error but for those of you that are running multi monitors like i am i've run a triple monitor system and the systray here this is a systrace sitting in the panel you can only ever have one systray running at a time so if you have three monitors and there's a panel on all monitors the systray can only be on one and the problem is it whichever one it loaded on and it would load on different ones you know depending on when i logged into q tile i guess it's whichever one loads it the fastest gets it and i always wanted this systray to be on the middle monitor so what i did i have this widgets list this very long widgets list this is every widget as far as they can be in my panel and what i did is i created uh these definitions here so i'm defining these functions where i have this group here these are the widgets that will appear on monitors one and three and this group here are the widgets that appear on monitor two which is the one we're currently looking at you see monitor two i really don't do anything special with it i just say hey load the entire widgets list but this one you notice i added an extra line i added uh delete and then the function widgets underscore screen 1 and then i'm slicing 7 through 18. what is a slice slice means i'm cutting it out so all the widgets in this list from 7 to 18 cut out that way it cuts out the spacing around the systrade the systray itself and i think i cut off a few more of the functions that i didn't need like i really don't need the price of bitcoin on every screen or something like that so that is slicing using python and because i've sliced out especially the system tray widget you know it cannot appear on monitors one or three anymore it's forced now to be on my second monitor some of the other changes i did i spent some time on my key bindings because i did need to add a lot of key bindings and i modified some key bindings because one of the cool things with qtel really in the last couple of versions is they now support key chords and they when they first introduced them it was kind of a hacky way to get them but now it's actually fully baked into qtile and it's really easy to do key chords and i'm talking about like emac style where you know emacs has these weird key bindings like ctrl c followed by ctrl f ctrl c followed by control x those are key chords and what you need to do is in your imports for qtal now you know when you're importing from qtile lib qtile.config and you import things like click drag group and key and screen and all of that make sure you also import key chord and then in your key bindings you know these are just your standard key bindings key that's just a normal key binding which is mod return it's launching my terminal now if you want a key chord instead of key you need to actually type key chord and i've got that somewhere down here let me go to the bottom of my key bindings alright so here are my key chords to launch emacs so instead of key we have key chord and i have control e and then in brackets here you know i've got this starting bracket the ending bracket and then the keys themselves so control e followed by e just launches emacs control e followed by b launches an i buffer in e max control e followed by d launches deer ed and emac so if i did control e followed by d right now that's gearhead which is the file manager that's built into emacs so that are those are key chords and then i created another set of key chords for my d menu scripts which i i like to do them as super p because super p is the default d menu key binding for i think dwm and xmonet it may be the default d menu key binding for qtile too i can't remember what the default is but it's typically super p for a run prompt you know and what i did is i made all of my d menu scripts use the key chord super p followed by another key so for example super p followed by e runs my dm comp uh script which is a it's a list of all the config files that i like to edit all the time so super p followed by e runs that particular d menu script and then i have you know all the other ones like uh super p followed by p runs past menu for my password so there's the password script there and actually it's interesting looking at my config fall right now on camera i'm actually noticing another thing i need to take care of it's not really an error but in all of my standard key bindings i have a description you know i'm telling you exactly what the key binding does and you put a description is because you do have the ability uh at the command line for qtile to tell you what all your key bindings are and if you have a description set of course the description will spit out too but you see i didn't actually add a description for any of the keys and the key chords so i need to go back and take care of that at some point one of the other things that was causing people problems because it was really erroring out is if i go to the bottom of my configure for the window manager rules this used to be a very long list you notice i only have three window manager rules as far as these are rules for when a window needs to be floated i used to have like 15 or 20 things here and the reason that was broken is because they changed the syntax of it they also changed the fact that now qtile ships with this here layout dot floating dot default underscore float underscore rules so this particular library default underscore float underscore rules that defines windows that are always floated no matter what you don't have to go in and specify because everybody wants these windows to float they are windows for utility notifications toolbar splash screens dialog boxes confirm boxes download boxes error messages you know these are all the standard windows that pop up that everybody wants to float you never want those in a tiling kind of layout so that's why the the qtile guys smartly you know defined those as default float rules and then i found some things that i needed to add myself for some programs i use all the time for example calculate with a queue now that is a calculator and when i pull up a calculator i don't want it to tile because it makes the layout all weird the buttons and everything they're scrunched up or stretched out wide a calculator just needs to be floated on the screen so when i run calculate uh gtk here you see it floats before it would have forced it in a tiling layout where it's taking up half the screen and it just looked really odd you know being in a tiling layout so now i forced that i've also forced uh the confirmation box within tastyworks which is a trading stock trading platform also force pine entry for the the pass command i showed you my demon use script to run the the pass menu command before so if i want to get my password for i don't know 0ad if i'm doing a multiplayer zero ad game you have to log in and this window used to be forced into tiling but now you know i set this rule here window manager class pine entry dash gtk 2. so how do you get these rules by the way how did i know that the calculate window is actually titled calculate with an exclamation how did i know window manager class for that that pass menu window was pine entry gtk2 well you use the x prop command in the terminal so if i launch a terminal and type x prop and hit enter you see my cursor turned into an x click on any window for example let me click on the alacrity window and it will give me window manager class and title and everything and you can see window manager class for alacrity is alacrity with a capital a so that's what i would set here if i needed to make alacrity always floating let me close out of alacrity there i think that's all of the major changes i made to the config as far as uh correcting errors like things that were going to cause you real problems if you used my config i mean i did clean up some of the key bindings i think used to i had these key bindings reverse where for example if i'm focused on my emacs window here i used to have super l as a shrink the window and super h as an expand the window which didn't make sense because i think super l should make that window bigger and super h should make it smaller that's the way it is in my xmonet config and my dwm config it was weird i had it reversed in my qtile config so i fixed that but i also doubled that binding because this this shrink with super h and super l that works in the monad tall layout which is your standard master and stack layout but if you're in a different layout for example let me get into the tiling layout this is mainly like a a master and stack but it's it's a different kind of master and stack but in this tiling layout i have super h and super l do something different i have them increase or decrease the number of windows in the master frame so if i do super h right now i just decrease the number of windows on the master frame you can't decrease it less than one so that didn't work but if i do super l to increase the number of windows in the master frame you see i get a second window over there and then super l one more time i've put three windows in the master frame if i do super h i decrease it super h one more time i decrease it again back to what it is out of the box all the other layouts are the same i had the full screen the max layout there's the stack layout which you have two different stacks and windows just stack on top of these two windows you and then i had the tree tab layout which i really don't use it's in my config mainly just for proof of concept just to show you this this thing i don't know if i would ever have much of a use for it and i really haven't played with it much i i originally wanted to configure it and do some neat things with it i've just never taken the time maybe that's something i'll do in a future video is actually see what i can get done with tree tab you know flesh it out a little bit more you can see what i wanted to do is have two different stacks of the tree tab you see i have the first workspace and then the second workspace but i'm not really doing anything with the second workspace anyway that may be a future video we may do something specifically on the tree tab layout with q-tile of course this is a floating layout and of course back to monad tall which is the master and stack so that was just a little bit of the corrections for my config i know a lot of people use my q-tile config you know like those videos i've made on q-tile have had you know just tens of thousands of views and i in a lot of ways i'm responsible for a lot of the popularity they're especially the resurgence of popularity in q-tile and so many people are using my config and the fact that there were so many errors in it you know i'm kind of ashamed that it took me so long to go in and correct those errors but you know i was living in other window managers so i didn't see them you know you guys were reporting them but a lot of times you'll report an error should i drop what i'm doing and go fix that error a lot of times i'm recording videos and everything but i know it's i'm making excuses but really i should have fixed these errors before now so for those of you that were waiting for a working qtah config it is up on my gitlab now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank absie dallas gabe blue mitchell allen akami archbishop 30 chuck david the other david dilling gregory lewis paul scott west willy these guys they are the producers of this episode they are my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well these are all my supporters over on patreon because i couldn't do what i do without your guys support you guys make the channel happen and if you'd like to support my work consider doing so look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace python's so much easier than haskell