I’ve spent about the past year using window managers on-and-off. I have, however, gained an amount of experience with i3 and Qtile. I shall attempt to make getting started with these two WMs a bit easier here.
Please do note that my configuration experience i3 and Qtile is nothing crazy. Everything in this article is just enough to begin getting around these WMs, something I had a bit of trouble with when I started out with this kind of desktop.
Any documentation referenced in this article will be linked below.
Firstly, you’re going to have to install i3. I assume you can do
whatever apt install or pacman -S or
xbps-install you need to. Just in case, install Xterm
too.
Exit your current session and log into your i3 session through your
display manager or TTY. You’ll see a prompt asking you to generate a
configuration. Press enter here. Then it’ll ask you which key you want
as your modifier key. I would suggest choosing the
<Win> option (it maps the modifier key to your
keyboard’s windows/command/meta/super key). If you’re particularly
crazy, choose <Alt>.
From this point, you’re going to have a black screen. The most important thing you need to access right now is your terminal. The default keybinding for that is your modifier key + enter.
The configuration is probably located in
~/.config/i3/
By default, your brightness, volume and media keys are not going to work.
Install a utility called brightnessctl. Test if its
working in the terminal, by executing a command like
brightnessctl set 10%-. IF you don’t get a permissions
error then you’re good to go. Otherwise, add your user to the video
group as such: usermod -aG video $USER.
Next, let’s bind the appropriate keys.
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +1
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec brightnessctl set 1-You can change the increment amount by changing the integer at the end of the respective lines.
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +2%
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -2%
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggleI am not aware if this works with pipewire or pulseaudio specifically, unfortunately.
Install a utility called playerctl. The basic commands
we are going to use here are playerctl play-pause,
playerctl next and playerctl previous.
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause
bindsym XF86AudioNext exec playerctl next
bindsym XF86AudioPrev exec playerctl previousIf you are a user of MPD, then install mpc.
bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec mpc toggle
bindsym XF86AudioNext exec mpc next
bindsym XF86AudioPrev exec mpc prevThere are 5 mod keys. The ones to be aware of in this
context are:
mod1 (left alt key)mod4 (meta/super/command/windows key)The syntax for creating a keybinding is as such:
bindsym [key-combination] exec [action]. For example, to
open Firefox, you would do something like
bindsym $mod+w exec firefox.
If you want to use the shift or control keys in your keybindings,
simply add it to the key combination,
i.e. bindsym $mod+Shift+a exec [action] or
bindsym $mod+Control+b exec [action].
I have close to zero experience with i3bar. I use Polybar here instead.
Simply add add a line starting with exec followed by the
command you want to execute: exec [action].
You should now have a somewhat functional configuration of i3. However, i3 does come with some pretty strange default keybindings, so I would recommend changing those. The i3 documentation is excellent. Have a go through that for guidance.
Firstly, install Qtile. It’ll probably be available in your distribution’s repositories; if not you can build it from source. Just in case, also install Xterm.
Once you’ve logged into a Qtile session, press windows/command/super/meta + enter to bring up a terminal.
The default configuration file should be located in
~/.config/qtile/. If it isn’t,
mkdir .config/qtile, cd .config/qtile,
touch config.py. Copy the default configuration from here
and paste it into config.py.
Keybindings are defined in the keys array towards the
top of the file. They follow this syntax:
Key([modifer-keys], "key", action).
Function keys probably won’t work out of the box. Let’s configure them.
Install brightnessctl. Make sure there are no issues
with permissions, as detailed above.
Key([], "XF86MonBrightnessUp", lazy.spawn("brightnessctl set +1")),
Key([], "XF86MonBrightnessDown", lazy.spawn("brightnessctl set 1-")),Key([], "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", lazy.spawn("pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +2%")),
Key([], "XF86AudioLowerVolume", lazy.spawn("pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -2%")),
Key([], "XF86AudioMute", lazy.spawn("pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle")),Install playerctl.
Key([], "XF86AudioPlay", lazy.spawn("playerctl play-pause")),
Key([], "XF86AudioNext", lazy.spawn("playerctl next")),
Key([], "XF86AudioPrev", lazy.spawn("playerctl previous")),If you are a user of MPD,
Key([], "XF86AudioPlay", lazy.spawn("mpc toggle")),
Key([], "XF86AudioNext", lazy.spawn("mpc next")),
Key([], "XF86AudioPrev", lazy.spawn("mpc prev")),Absolutely take the time to go through the layouts in the documentation. Some of these are a bit fiddly, but the ones I found most usable were ‘MonadTall’, ‘MonadWide’ and ‘TreeTab’. Your milage will absolutely vary.
Qtile has a pretty capable bar. The built-in widgets are here.
You should have a somewhat functional system at this point. I would absolutely recommend checking out the documentation. It is very well written.
You’re probably going to want to set a wallpaper.
nitrogen is a good utility for this.
For compositing, picom or xcompmgr. There
are others, but these are the only ones I’ve used.
For tweaking GTK themes, lxappearance. QT theming is a
bit more of a hassle. Install qt5ct. If you get an error
message about it not being configured probably, then some sort of
environment variable is probably missing. Unfortunately, I do not recall
this environment variable. kvantum-manager can help you get
consistent theming across GTK and QT apps. Simply set the widget style
to kvantum in qt5ct.
When it comes to installing apps, I would recommend installing apps with minimal dependencies. It’s probably better to not install apps from the Gnome or KDE ecosystem through your distribution’s package manager, try doing those from Flathub instead. Most apps from the lxqt, XFCE and Mate desktop environments have pretty minimal dependencies.
This article was written on 05/08/2023. If you have any thoughts, feel free to send me an email with them. Have a nice day!