Added default apps in groups

[Bennett-Wendorf]

This project adds functionality to groups that allows the user to set a default application for each group, and then spawn the default app for the current group with a single key bind (such as mod+t).

Since my implementation in the qtile-examples repo wasn't clean enough for my liking, this is the more integrated version. That alternative implementation can be found here. My intention is to present both solutions, and let the maintainers decide which implementation they would prefer.

[github-actions]

Thank you for opening your first PR into Qtile!
If you have not heard from us in a while, please feel free to ping one of the devs or anyone who has commented on the PR, as sometimes things fall through the cracks.
You can also join the chat room for real-time discussion, see the community links.
For details on what PRs might need to include before we will merge them please see the docs.

[Bennett-Wendorf]

Hi, I noticed that one of the workflows is failing on this project, but it looks unrelated to what I changed, and I'm not really sure what's going on. Would someone more knowledgeable be able to take a look and help me figure out how to get the docs building correctly?

[elParaguayo]

You probably need to rebase your branch onto the latest master. We fixed a bug in the workflows a few days ago.

[jwijenbergh]

Hi, thanks for the PR. I don't really like it to have this in the core unfortunately, but others might disagree.

In my config, I currently define groups and their arguments (the first arguments are unicode characters, just the group names):

group_labels = [(" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadwide'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'max'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'max'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'})]

groups = [Group(name, **kwargs) for name, kwargs in group_labels]

To extend this for default apps I can just do

group_labels = [(" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}, "chromium"),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadwide'}, terminal),
                (" ", {'layout': 'max'}, None),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}, None),
                (" ", {'layout': 'max'}, None),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}, None),
                (" ", {'layout': 'monadtall'}, None)]
groups = []
default_apps = {}
for name, kwargs, default_app in group_labels:
   groups.append(Group(name, **kwargs))
   # here my default (default default actually haha) app is emacs
   default = default_app or "emacs"
   default_apps[name] = default

def spawn_default_app(qtile, apps):
   qtile.spawn(apps[qtile.current_group.name])

keys.append(Key([mod], "t", lazy.function(spawn_default_app, default_apps)))

This keeps it short and simple, maybe even nicer way than the qtile-examples script you provided, but that's debatable. Hope this helps!

[Bennett-Wendorf]

I had tried something similar to that initially, but I found that it didn't really abstract out to a module particularly well. While I know that many Qtile users have enough experience programming to make something like this work, my hope with both pull requests was to make it as simple for the end user as possible. If you and the other maintainers think that this functionality doesn't make much sense in core, that's OK too!

[jwijenbergh]

I had tried something similar to that initially, but I found that it didn't really abstract out to a module particularly well. While I know that many Qtile users have enough experience programming to make something like this work, my hope with both pull requests was to make it as simple for the end user as possible. If you and the other maintainers think that this functionality doesn't make much sense in core, that's OK too!

Fair enough.

What do you think about this? @elParaguayo

[elParaguayo]

I don't see a need for it in the core code.

[jwijenbergh]

Let's work towards a nice example in the qtile-examples repo then. Thanks for the PR @Bennett-Wendorf