qtile-examples VS dotfiles

I have also combined this with some navigation over different focus/screens that I found here: https://github.com/qtile/qtile-examples/blob/master/traverse.py

Did you look at the linked examples in the official repo? I'm not aware of any other resource like that, except for some bits I found through this subreddit.

There is a qtile-examples repository, full of people's setups and tweaks.

basic notification system and example server

Most importantly, there are lines that define keybindings to start programs. I don't use qtile, but I think this example will help you figure things out. For instance, there is the # start specific apps section that explains that (with the given config) you have to press the mod key + n to start the browser or mod key + Enter to start the terminal.

Declaration for each 'theme'. (See qtile-examples for how to separate qtile into multiple files.)

I'm not completely dumbstruck, for example I can see that in this config the dev uses functions and hooks (idk what hooks are, sounds like a way to add event-driven functionality) to automatically set the window type to floating if the window name is equal to x.

You can find some example configs at qtile-examples but, note, some of those configs are quite old.

https://github.com/qtile/qtile-examples/blob/92c2659e771b42ca52342996181f2c1b3fdb0324/cjbarnes/config.py (line 60)

Thanks for your quick reply! Based on these sample configs, this seems like it should work, but for whatever reason it still isn't for me. I've posted my qtile config here; feel free to look at it if you have the time, but otherwise I'll keep poking around with this.