 In the last couple of weeks I have been getting a lot more questions from viewers of the channel about how can I make my tiling window manager look good. I'm getting a lot of new to tiling window manager users. A lot of you guys are trying out your first tiling window manager and immediately the first thing you guys see are all these amazing screenshots over at the r slash Unix porn subreddit. You see these gorgeous screenshots of these tiling window manager desktops and you're like, Hey, I want that. I want my tiling window manager to look just like that. So you guys are messaging me over on mastodon and on patreon. Hey, how can I customize my tiling window manager to look good? Well, you got to understand the tiling window manager itself has very little to do with what you're seeing in those screenshots because a window manager is just the frame around a window that determines where that window is placed on the screen. So for a tiling window manager, typically the frame around the windows about two pixels wide. It could be zero pixels wide if you choose not to have a frame at all. So really, you're not seeing anything as far as a tiling window manager in those screenshots. That's not what looks good. What looks good in those screenshots is the wallpaper, the panel, the run launcher they're using, the applications they're running, the terminals they're running, the terminal applications. That's what's making those screenshots look amazing. So today I wanted to cover a little bit of how I customize my tiling window managers to make them look amazing. So let me switch over to my desktop here. And today I am running Qtile. Qtile is a tiling window manager written in Python. I've done a ton of videos about Qtile, but it really doesn't matter what tiling window manager you're running. Most of what I'm going to discuss today is really window manager agnostic. So when you see this kind of sexy looking desktop, if I do say so myself, what's the first thing you really notice about this desktop? It's the wallpaper. I mean, that's most mostly what you see on the desktop, especially when no windows are open. All you see is the wallpaper. The wallpaper is everything. And if I open up my wallpaper program, which is Nitrogen, I have about 300 wallpapers in here. It's a really nice wallpaper pack of various mostly nature photographs, some abstract art, but there's some really good stuff in here. If you guys want my wallpaper pack, it is actually available over on QtLab. Speaking of some art, I really like this one here. Let's set that one. Let's rise our desktop a little bit. You guys want to go with some painting there. And you know what? We could go with the hot air balloon as well. Yeah, I really like that photograph. Let's go with that. So you guys that want my wallpapers, what you need to do, you need to open up a terminal and let me open up a terminal and zoom in. You guys need to run the following command, get clone, and then the location to my wallpapers repository on my GitLab, which is https colon slash slash gitlab.com slash dwt1, my username slash wallpapers.git because it's my wallpapers repository you're going to want. I have about a dozen repositories actually on my GitLab, but run that Git clone. It's not going to work on my system because I already have that directory. It already exists on my system, but for you guys, it'll create this wallpapers directory. Then what you need to do is CD into the newly created wallpapers directory and you will have the 300 or so wallpapers that you guys saw when I ran Nitrogen. So the wallpapers the most important thing because when you have no windows open, all you see is the wallpaper. But the minute you open a single window and really all you see is one window. So the most important program to worry about theming is usually the terminal because if you run a tiling window manager, chances are most of the programs you run are going to be terminals and terminal based applications that seems to be what most of us choose to run. And how do you make your terminal look good? I'm running the alacrity terminal, but all terminals are basically the same. You set a 16 color color scheme. You set the font that you want to use the size you want to use, and you can set some transparency. And I don't have transparency enabled in alacrity, but I could let me open up my alacrity config here inside them. And let me see if I can find where the transparency is set. So I'm going to do a search for opacity and here it is. The section here background opacity is currently set to 1.0, which means there's no transparency, right? It's 100% opaque meaning it's a solid color. But if I wanted to, I could comment that line out and I could uncomment this one and make it 95% opaque and do a quick write. And you see it reloads very quickly. And that is 95% opacity. If I wanted to, I could make it 90% opacity, make it even more opaque. And yeah, I kind of like that, right? Of course, if we do the terminal, a transparent terminal, we need to do a transparent panel too. And most panels have the ability to make your panels transparent. So I'm in Qtile. So let me open up my Qtile config. So do a quick search for my Qtile config. And once again, I'll open this up in Vim. And let's see if I can do a search for transparency or opacity. I know there's something here. Yeah, here's the top panels. I have three of them because I'm on a triple monitor system. But the ones you guys are seeing is actually this middle one. I'm going to change that from 1.0 to we'll do it the same as the terminal 0.9. So just a little transparency and restart Qtile. And now my panel is transparent. You guys see the same transparency as the terminal. And they had the same background color. So they're very, very similar now. Of course, now that I started playing with the transparency, I think I need to pick a better wallpaper or something that would look cooler. You know, it's got more of a pattern, something going on. And what I kind of like this one here with the Einstein face. It's got a like a graffiti art here. Let's see how a slightly transparent terminal would look there. Yeah, I kind of like that. And so we got the transparent terminal and transparent panel. And we have a nice wallpaper. The other thing people often want to customize is the run launcher, such as D menu, which I just opened here at the top of the screen. I can play with the colors and the fonts and that. All you need is the D menu source code, edit it and then run a pseudo make install. And the changes take effect. Those of you that run Rofi, you could play with the Rofi config. I don't think I have Rofi installed on the system, but if I did, I think it's Rofi space dash show run. Is that the command Rofi command not found? Yeah, Rofi. Rofi is not on the system. I could install it and play with it, but I typically use D menu anyway. Now the next thing is the terminal color schemes is how do you get these cool terminal color schemes? Well, you probably should just open up a web browser and search for them. So I would search for terminal color scheme. And we'll just do a Google search for it and see terminal dot sexy. This is a pretty cool website. You can actually get some pre existing terminal color schemes or you could create your own and see what they look like in this interactive website. Let me back out of terminal dot sexy and get back to the Google search results. The very first result here is a cool website. Go and all you have to do is enter a bash command to pull down these schemes, but there are several color schemes here with screenshots. I don't know several dozen probably just go through these terminal color schemes. Find one that speaks to you, right? And then grab those colors and then plug them into your terminal. How do you plug them into your terminal? Well, open up the config file for your terminal. Again, I'm using alacrity, but it really doesn't matter. They're all basically the same somewhere in your terminal config, whether it be alacrity, ST, term I, whatever it is you're using, you're going to find a section for setting 16 colors or 18 colors. If you include this background color and the foreground color, which is the text color. So you got the foreground or the text, then you got the background of the terminal. And then you have these 16 colors. And these 16 colors are where, you know, you get things for like the colors that are used in Neo Fetch, for example, or if you have colorful output for your LS command, you know, it takes those colors from the 16 colors you set in the configure. Now, another thing to consider those of you that really like those sexy screenshots, one of the reasons those screenshots that you guys see on r slash units porn look so good is because they have these windows with gigantic gaps, you know, so you can see the wallpaper and the programs. Now it's for people that are just running Tiling Window Managers, you would never add gigantic gaps around your windows, like the way those people do in those screenshots, but the gaps do make those screenshots look better. So if you have a way to add gaps around your windows with your Tiling Window Manager, put a very large gap around your windows and instantly it'll transform the way your screenshots look. On my Qtile config I have my layout section and one of the things you can set in each layout is the margin around the window and you can have different margins for each layout. What I've done is I have set a global value for margin so it's the same no matter what layout I'm in. I've set it to six pixels because I think it's enough border around the window, enough margin around the window where there is a gap, but it's not a ton of wasted space but what you see the guys on R slash Unix porn do is they put you know some crazy amount of gap, like a 26 pixel gap. Let's restart the window manager and you know they have these kinds of gaps so when they start opening windows you know you got this all the space around so you can really see the wallpaper. You can see a lot more of what's going on on the desktop when you add that kind of gap again. That's a ton of wasted space. I wouldn't use such gaps in my normal workflow. I typically keep it four to six pixels at most and most of the time I actually just run without gaps. And finally the big piece that I haven't talked about yet as far as completing that really sexy desktop is the panel. Now I run Qtile today is what I'm in. Qtile has its own built-in panel. It's part of the Qtile config. I've covered how to theme the Qtile panel before. I've done a lot with Xmonead. I've shown you guys a little bit of what you can do with Xmobar in Xmonead. You guys that are running Polybar. I actually don't run any window managers with Polybar. I don't have Polybar currently installed on my system. I actually do have a Polybar config on my GitLab though if you want to check it out. I configured my Polybar to look exactly like my Qtile bar. So it's got this power line effect alternating modules of blue and purple you know as far as the colors. So it looks very similar to my Qtile bar but I do have a Polybar config that looks like this on my GitLab. You guys can go pull that down and check it out. Beyond that you know a lot of the other stuff that people add to their screenshots to make it look good or just the programs themselves that they're running and you know I really don't know what to tell you on that. You know just open up the windows that you use the programs you use. A really interesting one is web browsers. I would always include a web browser in a screenshot that I was taking and I would include like a sexy start page that you custom designed yourself such as my surf browser here with my start page here and for those of you that want my build of surf I do have surf as a repository on my GitLab. Just go grab my build of surf and if you want my surf start page you will find that I think in my dot files repository in a folder called dot surf. Now before I go I want to think a few special people. I want to think the producers of the show. I want to think Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Fran, Arch5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. These guys they are the highest tiered patrons over on my Patreon and they are the producers of this episode. I also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because we have no corporate sponsors here at DistroTube. It's just me and you guys, the community. You'd like to support my work look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.