Qtile Bar In Another Window Manager?

[ddnn]

Is it possible to run the Qtile Bar In another window manager?

Why would someone want this?

I’d like to use the same bar across all my WMs (bspwm, dK, i3wm, Qtile) and Cinnamon. I’d also like to have clickable window buttons.

Currently, I use the xfce4-panel in all, but I notice that the window buttons only show in i3wm and Cinnamon. While WMs are made to be keyboard-centric, sometimes I’m feeling lazy and just prefer to click a button.

As far as I know from reading, polybar doesn’t have clickable window buttons, unlike Qtile bar’s tasklist.

So, how could the Qtile bar solve this?

I’m guessing that there is some setting in i3wm that allows it to not only show the window buttons on the Xfce panel, but to also interact with them. I’m thinking that maybe Qtile’s bar may be able to do the same, with the added benefit that it would work in all environments.

This is all speculation, and maybe it’s just my settings causing the issue.

However, in case it’s not my settings, does anyone know if this would be possible and how to go about doing it?

[xircon]

No. The bar code is not standalone, it is part of the WM.

[manyroads]

FWIW polybar does allow clickable workspace access.It may be of value to know that polybar has worked on every wm I ever tried/ used. That includes almost every x window primarily C coded tiler and most stackers.

[ddnn]

I know. It’s just the window buttons that I really want. Maybe in another year or so, and seeing as it’s python, it might be easier to implement on all. Just a guess.

[manyroads]

You can do clickable windows using rofi… should you be so inclined. I bind mine to alt-tab and then can click any running application.

[ddnn]

Hmmm… I did install rofi today with the intention of replacing cerebro (decided not to because rofi is slow in comparison), and I did see that it has that feature. I’ll look into it for sure. Thanks.

[manyroads]

You can speed up rofi by running it within j4-dmenu-desktop. Here’s an example:

` j4-dmenu-desktop --dmenu='rofi -modi drun,window,run -show drun -show-icons -theme nord2-ManyRoads -location 0 -width 480 '`

[ddnn]

Thanks! Will try it in a bit.

[ddnn]

So, I tried it. It consistently launches faster . But it is actually slower workflow-wise since I have to first press a key combo then either

• move my mouse to the pop-up window and click the window I want to focus
• or type part of the app name I want to switch to and hit enter.

Definitely wouldn’t achieve the purpose of being lazy, especially since I could just alt-tab until I get to the right window. Also, this certainly doesn’t fix the window button issue.

You did say:

@manyroads

I bind mine to alt-tab and then can click any running application.

But I, in my excitement, didn’t notice you said this before

All the same, thanks for trying to help out. Will just have to get used to having no window buttons outside of i3 and Cinnamon.

PS: As I said, using j4-dmenu is consistently faster even after hours of uptime. It’s great!

[ddnn]

Side note: Just found out that cerebro actually has the same functionality you mentioned here.

cerebro-window-manager

For me, the “bad” thing about cerebro, and I mean one of the only two, is that you can’t bind it to the super key - even if you go into the config file. It just launches another instance instead or just doesn’t do anything.

So, right now I have it set to “Alt+s” but I am almost sure that I use an app that uses that binding for something significant. I’ll eventually find out which app that is.

EDIT: Found out very quickly that Firefox doesn’t like that. It’s not significant, but it would be annoying.

The other bad thing is that it can’t run services/daemons like syncthing and rslsync. Apart from these two things, I find it to be faster than even the optimisation that j4-dmenu provides.

[ddnn]

Solution found! Kinda…

So, the Xfce panel has plugins, and I decided to check out some from the AUR. Came across the xfce4-dockbarx-plugin. It works!

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However, it doesn’t work in dK. But only dK, so great!

Lastly, I’d prefer the window titles to be visible, but icons are great too.

UPDATE (in case someone sees this in the future): After trying out the Archcraft tint2 panel setup, I’ve now switched to, you guessed it, tint2! It has every thing I need in a panel with an easy-to-understand and/or -customise config file.

PS: As for dockbarx, it sometimes crashes with a “quit me or relaunch me” crash dialogue box. So, that’s why I ended up switching, as it happens when I switch workspaces. Not all the time, but enough to annoy.

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