Installing Qtile

Distro Guides

Below are the preferred installation methods for specific distros. If you are running something else, please see Installing From Source.

Installing From Source

First, you need to install all of Qtile’s dependencies (although some are optional/not needed depending on your Python version, as noted below).

We aim to always support the last three versions of CPython, the reference Python interpreter. We usually support the latest stable version of PyPy as well. You can check the versions and interpreters we currently run our test suite against in our tox configuration file.

There are not many differences between versions aside from Python features you may or may not be able to use in your config. PyPy should be faster at runtime than any corresponding CPython version under most circumstances, especially for bits of Python code that are run many times. CPython should start up faster than PyPy and has better compatibility for external libraries.

xcffib

Qtile uses xcffib as an XCB binding, which has its own instructions for building from source. However, if you’d like to skip building it, you can install its dependencies, you will need libxcb and libffi with the associated headers (libxcb-render0-dev and libffi-dev on Ubuntu), and install it via PyPI:

pip install xcffib

cairocffi

Qtile uses cairocffi with XCB support via xcffib. You’ll need libcairo2, the underlying library used by the binding. You should be sure before you install cairocffi that xcffib has been installed, otherwise the needed cairo-xcb bindings will not be built. Once you’ve got the dependencies installed, you can use the latest version on PyPI:

pip install --no-cache-dir cairocffi

pangocairo

You’ll also need libpangocairo, which on Ubuntu can be installed via sudo apt-get install libpangocairo-1.0-0. Qtile uses this to provide text rendering (and binds directly to it via cffi with a small in-tree binding).

dbus-next

Qtile uses dbus-next to interact with dbus. Qtile will run without this package but certain functionality will be lost (e.g. notifications).

You can install dbus-next from PyPi:

pip install dbus-next

Qtile

With the dependencies in place, you can now install qtile:

git clone git://github.com/qtile/qtile.git
cd qtile
pip install .

Stable versions of Qtile can be installed from PyPI:

pip install qtile

As long as the necessary libraries are in place, this can be done at any point, however, it is recommended that you first install xcffib to ensure the cairo-xcb bindings are built (see above).

Wayland

Qtile can also be run as a Wayland compositor rather than an X11 window manager. This does not require an X server or xcffib to be installed. Instead Qtile uses pywlroots, a Python binding around the wlroots library, both of which must be installed with the latest release. Be aware that some distributions package outdated versions of wlroots. pywlroots can be installed using pip install as above.

Qtile can then be run either from a TTY, or within an existing X11 or Wayland session where it will run inside a nested window:

qtile start -b wayland

If you want your config file to work with different backends but want some options set differently per backend, something like this may be useful:

from libqtile import qtile

if qtile.core.name == "x11":
    term = "urxvt"
elif qtile.core.name == "wayland":
    term = "foot"