 It has been a significant amount of time since I've spent any time in Qtile and I think that it's about time that I Rectify that situation so over the next week I'm going to be using Qtile full-time on both this computer and the computer behind me And once I'm done with that week, I'll make a wrap-up video But what I wanted to do today was talk about some of my first impressions. I've spent Probably about 12 hours in Qtile now over the last day And I want to just talk about some of the things that I've experienced over that day kind of getting things things set up So let me show you what my Qtile looks like right now This is Qtile as I have set it up now The first thing I should say is that I have a confession. These are not my dot files. I borrowed them off from a person on Twitter I'm sorry. I forgot your name, but I will link to My dot files of these in the video description below and I Always almost always use someone else's dot files when I switch to a new window manager simply because I don't have to set Things up and I can kind of see how things are done. It's much easier for me to learn How to do something if I've seen someone else do it instead of me trying to go spelunking into the documentation Learning stuff for myself. It's just kind of the way that I've always done things when it comes to window managers It's how I learned y3. It's how I learned DWM. It's how I learned X monad you get the idea so this is my Qtile set up and The first thing that I had an impression of was the bar now I have used Qtile before and I've messed around with the bar before and my impression of the bar Previously was that the bar was kind of meh. It wasn't all that great. I Didn't really know all that much about it. I didn't really care for how it was set up the Documentation for the bar really isn't all that great unless you know Python and it's just it was always kind of a meh Kind of bar for me. I always preferred poly bar. However, I have to say With the way this bar is set up and now Understanding a little bit more Python than I did before the last time I use Qtile This bar is actually really good and there's a lot of stuff here So first of all, there's a lot of widgets that you can choose from they have a lot of built-in widgets And that's really nice But also has capabilities that poly bar doesn't it can be put vertically if you want it to have vertical You want to have a vertical bar you can have your tray your system tray wherever you want it Which is nice. It's not something you can do with poly bar at least not easily with the built-in widgets I should say that being said, of course, there are some Limitations that I've found a little bit vexing. So first actually using your own like bash script to make a widget Doesn't seem to be possible. There is a text box widget that says it can do scripts I haven't figured out how it can do because it doesn't really have an example of how it's done So I'm not sure if that will work for me or not But that's one area that I've had problems with it so far Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to exclude Widgets from one bar or the other now. I'm assuming that there actually is a way and I just don't know it yet I've asked a question on reddit. I'm waiting for some responses there to see if there's actually a way to do that There probably is and like I said, I just don't know it. I did some googling couldn't find it But basically what I want to do is make it so that the tray only appears on the main monitor And not on this one because you can only have one system tray It always crashes on the other the other bar. So I'm wanting to exclude that So overall, I really like this bar the setup for if I show you this The setup for it looks something like this and it's not a bad Set up if you understand python at all now my understanding of python is very minimal It is better than it used to be but it's still fairly minimal So I'm still kind of getting my head wrapped around all this But basically the way it works is you have each of these sections is a widget that appears on the bar So this thing right here is a widget this widget box here is a widget where all the workspaces are This part here's a widget and so on and so forth Right each of these parts is a widget and each of these sections corresponds with a widget Each widget has a section of options that you can choose Foreground background things like that that you can use to customize What the widget looks like what it displays and so on and so forth So getting your head wrapped around how all this works is fairly simple because it's just left to right Any widgets you put at the top are going to appear on the left and then just one right after another So it's actually nice and like I said before there are a ton of widgets that you can choose from All those are fairly well documented on the Qtile website. This is the Qtile documentation And like you can see here, there are a ton of widgets and all of them have options that you can use now One of the places where I find the documentation for Qtile to be a little bit lacking is that it doesn't actually have Examples now it shows you what it will look like and if you can Kind of suss out how This works you can kind of use this as an example in some places not in every one of them But in some of them and not even all of them have an example section So that's kind of a lacking place for me, especially if you don't know anything about Qtile Now I was told earlier today that Qtile Is not for people who don't understand at least a little bit of python So if you don't know a little bit of python, you're probably going to be in a rough spot Unless you're willing to absolutely learn as you go and that's kind of my position right now is I'm still learning as I go There's a lot of things here that I don't really know how to do So I'm kind of meandering my way through the documentation stumbling searching for examples. Like I said at the beginning I Learned better when I see somebody else do something. So I'm Looking for videos and I'm looking at other people's configuration files to see how they did it And then I can kind of emulate that and learn as I go along about why they've done the things the way they've done So that's the way I've been trying to do it. Honestly, I'm gonna say this out loud and I've probably talked about this before Qtile has fantastic documentation. It's one of the window managers that has the best documentation But after spending my day going through this I would say that it's very technical documentation It is definitely not for the brand new user Whereas if you go to something like the documentation for i3 while this does have technical sessions You can tell that it's written for someone who's doesn't really know any like programming language or whatever And you can understand that because i3 is configured in a non Difficult programming language. It's configured in a user friendly syntax Whereas qtile is configured in python So you can kind of understand why the differences in documentation exist I would say that I would prefer the more user friendly way of configuring a window manager as of right now I'm still kind of struggling with the python But I think I will be able to push through with my basic knowledge Now my biggest issue so far 12 hours in Is the way qtile manages workspaces So unlike i3 where when you set it up the proper way you can tell i3 where the workspaces are supposed to spawn So I have always in i3 workspaces one through nine on monitor one I have workspaces 10 through 19 on monitor two and there's never going to be a situation where monitor like 14 ends up on monitor one It just won't happen now It can happen if I wanted to use a key binding to switch them over But that'd be have to be something that I do manually by default the way I have it set up That's the way workspaces work on i3 and that's the way i'm used to working But in qtile the workspaces that you have are set So you have in in my case I have it set up for 12 workspaces And they can appear on either monitor depending on where you are focused So for example right now I have workspace three focused And I have workspace six on this monitor So if I actually change to workspace six, but the mouse is over here What's going to happen is instead of the mouse moving over there to that second monitor It's actually going to bring workspace six to this monitor. So now you can you know see what's on workspace six and workspace three, which is was here has been moved to this monitor. So they switched places and That is a really really weird workflow now I've seen it before obviously because I've used qtile before but one of the reasons why I never stuck with qtile Is because this workspace Management system is just not the way I prefer to do my workflow I like fixed workspaces where they're supposed to be having them move around onto different monitors is a little weird for me And it's definitely not something that I've found it easy to get used to And another thing that I've kind of had to pay pay attention to is because if I want to stay on A certain monitor. So for example, let's just say I wanted to go work on workspace six But I didn't want them to switch around Instead of moving to workspace six, I have to use the key binding to move focus to that monitor So in my case, it's going to be super Period, I think that may be default on qtile. I'm not sure But basically what that does is just moves the mouse and the focus of everything over to the other monitor And I've had to get used to that Over the last day. It's been a chore to just to put it frankly It's just not the way I prefer Workspaces to work I do however think that If I spend enough time here, I could get used to it whether or not I will ever come to enjoy this way of managing workspaces. I don't know We'll see at the end of the week But as of right now, I think that I can get used to it because I have gotten used to it Even just using it 12 hours But I don't know whether or not I will ever come to love it or not I know a lot of people prefer this way of managing workspaces me personally Not there yet One of the things that I haven't played around with yet is the different layouts that qtile comes with so qtile has many different Layouts available to it. So I don't even know the key binding to change them I so I just click the icon up there where it will Kind of do this kind of thing where I can have different layouts and stuff I'm again Not sure if I'll ever even play with that because I never changed the workspace Layout in i3 either. I just kind of use the default one With autotiling I suppose but yeah The layouts have been something that I have not messed around with And I don't even think that they're all enabled in this configuration file yet And finally the last thing that I want to talk about in terms of my first impressions is the way that qtile fails Now the thing about having to configure your window manager in a actual programming language Is that if you don't know the programming language very well and you don't know the syntax and the little nitpicks that it has You're going to make mistakes and my biggest mistake is remembering The comma like python is comma happy like every line that you have to In your configuration file every every line has to have a comma at the end of it for the most part There are some exceptions. There are some places where it works just fine without a comma So for whatever reason for example, this line right here doesn't have a comma. I don't know why That's from whoever did this configuration file. It's not mine But apparently works just fine because i'm getting no errors But if I were to delete a comma like say here the configuration file would fail And I'd be out of luck, right? So one of the things that I've noticed is that if you don't remember those little things You're going to have qtile not be able to read your whole configuration file. So The thing that I wanted to talk about was that when you do make a mistake Your configuration file doesn't load at all instead loads the default configuration file And you would think that that's not a bad thing, right? But I found That it's not actually all that useful. Yes, you can usually continue to edit in the Window that you're on. So let's just say you're still in the configuration file when you do a reset of qtile You can go back and try to find your mistake if the window is still open, but Sometimes new windows won't open because you're some of your key bindings just don't work Because you're using a different configuration file, but also it makes it a little bit more difficult to actually Get back into your configuration file once you've made the channels I've still haven't figured how how to do that yet So supposedly there's a key binding that will then restart qtile again And then I think maybe then it will take you back to your configuration file if the error has been corrected I haven't figured that out yet. So with i3 the best part about i3 I mean maybe not the best part but a really good part is that when you make an error in the configuration file i3 continues to run like it still uses your configuration file everything works just fine and dandy But it will also pop up an error. It will tell you hey This thing is wrong on this line and you need to go fix it xmonad does the same thing qtile I'm assuming that there's a log somewhere. I just haven't found it yet But it definitely doesn't pop up with a notification saying hey, here's some error You need to go fix it at least on my system. It doesn't do that So that's the graceful fit failing part isn't so graceful on qtile And it's a bigger problem Simply because I don't know a lot of python and i'm always making mistakes. I'm always forgetting that damn comma I'm always forgetting to close my parentheses, which is a dumb mistake. I know but it happens and you know It just it fails a lot and not having the ability to get back into My configuration file at least so far learning how to do that Has been an issue because it basically just had to at that point shut my computer off and come back on Like I haven't even figured out in the default configuration file how to quit qtile Although I think it's like super q super shift q some like that It doesn't actually work for me on fedora for whatever reason but that's not that's a fedora problem I'm that I have that same problem with in i3. It won't log out. I don't know what's going on there But anyways, those are the things that I've stumbled upon in my day first day with qtile overall my my impressions are That I like it now. I don't think that I like it more than i3. I don't know that I will ever like it more than i3 But it's fresh and that's kind of the reason why i'm doing this is I wanted to try something a little bit fresher something that I've not used in the past very much and kind of You know expand my horizons a little bit by using something different now Qtile does have a wayland session that comes when you install qtile I'm going to spend some time in that over this week probably not a lot of time because Wayland and me don't really get along all that well at least we didn't last time we talked We had a big fight. It didn't end well, you know So we'll see if wayland is better for me this time than it was the last time I tried it And I've never used the wayland session of qtile before so we'll see how that works. I'm not sure I really don't anything about it other than it's included. So that'll be an adventure too So I'm going to use qtile for at least a whole week And then I'll make another video where I kind of wrap things up give my final thoughts on how it goes So make sure you're subscribed for that You don't want to miss it If you have comments on qtile or any of this stuff Maybe you have some help that you could give me on the things that I mentioned You can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on twitter at the linux cast 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 linux cast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all amazing people without you the challenges would not be anywhere Near close to where it is right now. So thank you for your support. I truly do appreciate it The words do not do it justice. So thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time