#qutebrowser profile manager

qutebrowser profile manager (qbpm) is a tool for creating and managing qutebrowser profiles. There isn't any built in concept of profiles in qutebrowser, but there is a --basedir flag which allows qutebrowser to use any directory as the location of its config and data and effectively act as a profile. qbpm creates profiles that source your main qutebrowser config.py, but have their own separate autoconfig.yml, bookmarks, cookies, history, and other data. It also acts as a wrapper around qutebrowser that sets up --basedir for you, so you can treat qbpm launch as an alias for qutebrowser, such as to open a url: qbpm launch my-profile example.org.

qutebrowser shares session depending on the basedir, so launching the same profile twice will result in two windows sharing a session, which means running :quit in one will exit both and launching the profile again will reopen both windows. But launching two distinct profiles will start two entirely separate instances of qutebrowser which can be opened and closed independently.

#Usage

Create a new profile called "python", edit its config.py, then launch it:

$ qbpm new python
$ qbpm edit python
$ qbpm launch python docs.python.org
$ qbpm choose # run dmenu or another launcher to pick a profile

qbpm from-session can copy the tabs of a saved qutebrowser session to a new profile. If you have a window full of tabs related to planning a vacation, you could save it to a session called "vacation" using :session-save -o vacation in qutebrowser, then create a new profile with those tabs:

$ qbpm from-session vacation

The default profile directory is $XDG_DATA_HOME/qutebrowser-profiles, where $XDG_DATA_HOME is usually $HOME/.local/share, but you can create and launch profiles from anywhere using --profile-dir/-P:

$ qbpm --profile-dir ~/dev/my-project new qb-profile
$ cd ~/dev/my-project
$ qbpm -P . launch qb-profile
# or
$ qutebrowser --basedir qb-profile

#Installation

If you're on Arch, you can install the AUR package: qbpm-git. If you use Nix, qbpm is available as a flake, which can be added as an input to your system flake or installed to your profile using nix profile install github:pvsr/qbpm; there's also a standalone default.nix file for use with nix-env.

For all other systems the best option is probably pipx. Using pipx you can run qbpm without installing by running pipx run --spec git+https://github.com/pvsr/qbpm.git qbpm, and install it with pipx install git+https://github.com/pvsr/qbpm.git. If you're on Linux you can copy contrib/qbpm.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications to create a qbpm desktop application that runs qbpm choose.

#MacOS

Nix and pipx will install qbpm as a command-line application, but if you want a native Mac application too you can clone this repository or copy contrib/qbpm.platypus to a local file, install platypus, and use it to create a qbpm app by running platypus -P contrib/qbpm.platypus /Applications/qbpm.app. That will also make qbpm available to select as a default browser in System Preferences > General > Default web browser. Note that there is currently a qutebrowser bug that results in unnecessary file:///* tabs being opened.

#Future ideas that may or may not happen

• Release through github
• More shared or copied config and data
• Use any profile as a base for new profiles (currently only the main config in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is supported)
• Source autoconfig.yml instead of config.py
• Bundled config file optimized for single-site browsing
• qbpm.conf to configure the features above
• Someday: qutebrowser plugin