Installing Qtile¶
Distro Guides¶
Warning: all of these distro guides are out of date with the cffi branch. Please install from source for now. Installation will be _much_ simpler in the very near future.
Below are the preferred installation methods for specific distros. If you are running something else, please see Installing From Source.
Installing From Source¶
Qtile relies on some cutting-edge features in PyCairo, XCB, and xpyb. Until the latest versions of these projects make it into distros, it’s best to use recent checkouts from their repositories.
Here is a brief step-by-step guide to installing Qtile and its dependencies from source:
Once You’ve Installed¶
Once you’ve installed there are several ways to start Qtile. The most common way is via an entry in your X session manager’s menu. The default Qtile behavior can be invoked by creating a qtile.desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions.
A second way to start Qtile is a custom X session. This way allows you to invoke Qtile with custom arguments, and also allows you to do any setup you want (e.g. special keyboard bindings like mapping caps lock to control, setting your desktop background, etc.) before Qtile starts. If you’re using an X session manager, you still may need to create a custom.desktop file similar to the qtile.desktop file above, but with Exec=/etc/X11/xsession. Then, create your own ~/.xsession. There are several examples of user defined xsession s in the qtile-examples repository.