Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written in Python.

Features

• Simple, small and extensible. It's easy to write your own layouts, widgets and built-in commands.
• Configured entirely in Python.
• Command-line shell that allows all aspects of Qtile to be manipulated and inspected.
• Complete remote scriptability - write scripts to set up workspaces, manipulate windows, update status bar widgets and more.
• Qtile's scriptability has made thorough unit testing possible, making it one of the best-tested window managers around.

Dependencies

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's a brief step-by-step guide:

libxcb

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xcb/libxcb
cd libxcb
./configure
make
sudo make install

xpyb

The xpyb repo has some... eccentricities at the moment, that may be fixed soon.

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xcb/xpyb
cd xpyb

Now, edit configure.ac, and change the version from 1.2 to 1.3.

mkdir m4
./configure --disable-drm2
make
sudo make install

cairo

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/cairo
./configure --enable-xcb
make
sudo make install

py2cairo

git clone git://git.cairographics.org/git/py2cairo
cd py2cairo
./configure

Check the configure output to make sure that XPYB is correctly detected.

make
sudo make install

If you plan to run the test suite, you will also need the Pry unit testing framework, and the Python X Library.