 I don't think it will come as much of a surprise to anyone who has watched the channel for any amount of time that I'm a Tiling Window Manager fanboy. And I propagate my love of Tiling Window Managers to everyone who watches my channel over and over again. I just make a ton of videos on Tiling Window Managers. I think they're amazing. And I would argue that if you try it, you would probably think it's amazing too. But I know that Tiling Window Managers aren't for everyone. For those of you who are or have considered switching to a Tiling Window Manager, there are a few things that you should definitely know. So the biggest one that you absolutely should know is that a Tiling Window Manager, just like all Window Managers, are just that. They only exist to manage your windows. They're not going to come with a settings panel or the ability to set your wallpaper or the ability to change Bluetooth settings or any of this stuff. None of that stuff is going to be built into a Window Manager at all, whether it's Tiling or otherwise. So once you've gotten your head around that, you're probably wondering, well, how do I do all of those things? Well, there are obviously ways to do those things without having a back end like you'd get in a desktop environment. The difficulty comes in actually finding those tools and discovering that you kind of have to piece together all of the functionality that you would have gotten if you'd just used a desktop environment in the first place. So today, what I'm going to be talking about is five tools that every Tiling Window Manager user needs to know about. Now there are definitely other tools that could have been on this list and should be on this list. This could have been a 20 item list if I wanted to, maybe even more than that. But I wanted to stick to five. These are the ones that I consider very important for most people, at least four of them meet that criteria. One of them is kind of frivolous, but we'll get to that when we get there. So let's go ahead and jump into the first tool. Now the first tool that everyone should have on their computer when they switch to a window manager of some kind is a tool that allows them to set the wallpaper. So my tool of choice for this is FEH or FEH, however you pronounce it. I'm not actually sure, but however you pronounce it. What this is is a command line tool that allows you to set wallpapers. Now there are other tools that you could use for this. One of them is called Nitrogen. That is a GUI based application that allows you to choose your wallpaper. It's probably more appropriate for new users, but I prefer Fed just because I'm a nerd and I prefer to do things in the terminals. So let me show you quickly how this works. So I have three wallpapers in this directory here. So let's say I wanted to set one of these wallpapers as the wallpaper I want to use right now. So in order to do that, I would use the FEH command and FEH is in almost every Linux distributions repository. All you'd have to do is sudo apt install FEH or sudo DNF install FEH, whatever happens to be for you. It'll be easy to download. So in order to set one of these wallpapers, as my wallpaper, I do dash dash bg dash f-i-l and then the name of the wallpaper. So I'm just going to do fedora.png here and then I hit enter and you'll see that I've now changed my wallpaper and it's really as simple as that. Now there are more things that you should know about fed and I have found several YouTube videos explaining how to do this. So I will point you towards those in order to learn the intricacies of using it. But you can set it up so that it will remember your wallpaper upon reboot. That is something that you can do. And you can also set it so that it's tiled or centered or however you want. You just kind of have to learn the flags. So that's FEH. The alternatives to this, as I said, would be nitrogen. It's also a very good application. The next application that I think everyone needs is a menu system. So the vast majority of window managers, whether they're tiling or not, do not include any type of menu system. So you won't have any way of launching a application if you don't have a menu system of some kind unless you want to launch everything from the terminal. So there are two options for you and both of them are equally good. So there's D menu, which is a suckless tool, and it is very minimal, but works very well out of the box. All you have to do is install it. And again, it's going to be in most distros repos, although there are different names depending on what distributions you're using. So in Ubuntu slash Devon, you're going to be downloading suckless tools. I think in Fedora, it might just be D menu. It also might be suckless tools. I'm not sure. You can also build it yourself very easily. So menu system that I use, however, is called Rofi. And this is what Rofi looks like, although for everyone else, it will look slightly different because I've obviously themed this. But basically what this allows you to do is launch applications. That's the simplest use that Rofi has. It also has other things that you can do with it. You can script with it so that you can do things like change your theme. Like I do, I've written a script that allows me to change my theme. So like this, I now have a Dracula type theme. You can also do things like things like switch between open windows and stuff like that. So that is Rofi. The menu also has similar functionality. It's just a matter of learning which way you want to do it. I prefer Rofi simply because I'm more familiar with it. But the menu is also good. The next application that everyone probably needs is a tool called Qt5 CT. Now that's a mouthful and you will always probably forget that tool's name. But basically what it allows you to do is set Qt themes on your system. So anything that uses the Qt framework, so that would be pretty much any KDE application is going to need to be themed, otherwise they're going to look kind of but ugly. Qt5 CT allows you to do that now. How you use Qt5 CT is going to be basically the subject of an entirely different video because it is kind of complex. But this is the application that you would use to theme Qt apps. You can also use an application called Covantum, or you can use both of them. It really depends on how you want to go about theming your Qt applications. Personally, the way I've been doing it now is that I just find one dark theme and leave it. I never theme it to anything else. I think I'm right now using the Grubbox theme to be honest with you. It looks pretty good basically no matter what theme that I'm using. And I don't honestly have that many KDE applications that I use on a day to day basis. The only one that I really do use is Crusader and it works fine just in this theme here. So that is Qt5 CT. Like I said, if you decide you need to use this application to theme your Qt applications, I would highly recommend looking up a tutorial on how to use it because there's an environment variable that you need to set in order for it to work. That is going to be probably the biggest hurdle to actually using this application. The next application is very similar to Qt5 CT and that's going to be LX Appearance. LX Appearance, all one word. And what this does is basically the same thing as Qt5 CT, only this themes GTK applications. So this one is probably going to be much more useful for most people because the vast majority of applications are actually GTK based. LX Appearance allows you to theme those things. So you would install a theme just like you would in like Denome or something like that. Like a proper folder and then it would appear in this application and you could change it to whatever you want and then apply and then that would then apply to every single GTK application that you have. And unlike Qt5 CT, this one doesn't require any weird environment variables or anything like that. You just install this thing and it will allow you to change the theme. It also will allow you to change the icon theme, the mouse cursor, the font, things like that. But again, those things will only apply to GTK themes. So the last one on the list is the superfluous or frivolous one that I mentioned at the beginning. This one is going to be a font instead of a tool and I include this one because a lot of people wonder how I get the icons in my terminal and how I get icons in my bar and stuff like that. A lot of people ask me this question and really the process for that is going to be different depending on what you're trying to rice or what theme I suppose you should say. But the common functionality between all this stuff is that I use nerd fonts. And nerd fonts is a huge collection of icon fonts and other types of fonts that allow you to use icons in your bars and terminals and stuff like that. Now I should say it's not just icon fonts. It also has monospace fonts and other types of fonts as well. When I say a huge collection, I mean a huge collection. If you download all of them, which I do, it's several gigabytes worth of fonts. It's insane how many fonts are included in this set. I would highly recommend not doing what I do and installing all of them. I would say go through all of the fonts on the website and then find one you like and then just download that font or download the font that you like instead of downloading the whole pack. I download them all because I switch between fonts every once in a while and I just like having them on hand. But most people aren't me. So just find the font that you want and then download it here. Now the thing about NerdFonts is that they're not in every single repository unfortunately. So you can find them if you are using an arch. A lot of them are in the AUR, Ubuntu and WNHF. Some of them packaged individually, but not the whole thing. I'm not sure about Fedora to be honest with you. I've never actually looked in the Fedora repos whether or not NerdFonts is there. But the way I usually do it is go to their GitHub page, clone the entire repo and then use the install script that's included in the repository. Just run that and it installs them all for you. Obviously this is going to make your font collection much, much bigger. So it means when you're trying to scroll through, trying to find the right font, you're going to have a lot more to scroll through. Whether or not that's a good thing for you or not, it really depends, right? So that is the fifth tool. Now obviously, like I said at the beginning, there are many other tools that I could have included on this list. Things like Blue Man. Blue Man will allow you to manage your Bluetooth connections. That is a very important one for a lot of people. Things like a favorite terminal emulator. I highly recommend you find your own terminal emulator, whether you're just going to be using the one that you've always been familiar with or you're exploring something new. I would highly recommend finding one that is good and one that suits your needs. So there are, like I said, several other tools that I could have put on here. And I may make a follow-up video to this video if you guys are interested in some more of these tools. So in the comment section below, let me know any tools that you would like to see in a future video or tools that you use in your tiling window manager. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. Just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all amazing people. I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am. We just made 20,000 subscribers. So I'm really, really, really pleased about that. So thanks to everybody for that. Thanks to everybody who's watched this channel over the last year. They're just, you're all amazing people. So thanks so very much. Thanks to everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.