Hooks

Qtile provides a mechanism for subscribing to certain events in libqtile.hook. To subscribe to a hook in your configuration, simply decorate a function with the hook you wish to subscribe to.

See Built-in Hooks for a listing of available hooks.

Examples

Automatic floating dialogs

Let’s say we wanted to automatically float all dialog windows (this code is not actually necessary; Qtile floats all dialogs by default). We would subscribe to the client_new hook to tell us when a new window has opened and, if the type is “dialog”, as can set the window to float. In our configuration file it would look something like this:

from libqtile import hook

@hook.subscribe.client_new
def floating_dialogs(window):
    dialog = window.window.get_wm_type() == 'dialog'
    transient = window.window.get_wm_transient_for()
    if dialog or transient:
        window.floating = True

A list of available hooks can be found in the Built-in Hooks reference.

Autostart

If you want to run commands or spawn some applications when Qtile starts, you’ll want to look at the startup and startup_once hooks. startup is emitted every time Qtile starts (including restarts), whereas startup_once is only emitted on the very first startup.

Let’s create a file ~/.config/qtile/autostart.sh that will set our desktop wallpaper and start a few programs when Qtile first runs.

#!/bin/sh
feh --bg-scale ~/images/wallpaper.jpg &
pidgin &
dropbox start &

We can then subscribe to startup_once to run this script:

import os
import subprocess

@hook.subscribe.startup_once
def autostart():
    home = os.path.expanduser('~/.config/qtile/autostart.sh')
    subprocess.call([home])

Accessing the qtile object

If you want to do something with the Qtile manager instance inside a hook, it can be imported into your config:

from libqtile import qtile