qpm: qutebrowser profile manager

qutebrowser is a web browser with vim-like keybindings. It's great! qpm is a tool for managing qutebrowser profiles. Profiles means starting qutebrowser with --basedir, which makes qutebrowser store all of its config and state in the given directory, the profile. qpm's main purposes are to configure profiles to share config, bookmarks, and more with you main qutebrowser session or other profiles' (WIP), and to make it easy to run these profiles as independent, persistent, qutebrowser sessions. Independent meaning multiple sessions can run at the same time without bothering each and persistent meaning open tabs can be saved to disk and reloaded at any time.

Use cases

• Use a work profile to isolate your work logins from your personal ones. Especially important if you have a work account on Google or Github!
• Project-based profiles. I have a qpm profile which has library documentation, qutebrowser config, CI results, issues and PRs, and everything I need to work on qpm.
• So qutebrowser is great, but if you leave a lot of tabs open 24/7 you might notice that qutebrowser leaks a little bit of memory. I use profiles both to organize my browsing and keep the number of open tabs and memory usage low. Since profiles are very quick to stop and start I open tabs when I need them and I close them when I don't, and I know I won't lose them.

Usage

# create and launch a new profile called "finance" in $XDG_DATA_HOME/qutebrowser-profiles
$ qpm new finance --launch
# or
$ qpm launch finance

# convert the contents of a window into a new profile
# in qutebrowser, run: "session-save -o profile-name"
$ qpm from-session profile-name

# you can keep profiles anywhere, such as project dirs
$ qpm -P ~/dev/qpm new profile-name
$ cd ~/dev/qpm
$ qpm -P . launch profile-name

# arguments that qpm doesn't recognize will be passed to qutebrowser
$ qpm launch python docs.python.org --target window --loglevel info
# is functionally equivalent to:
$ qutebrowser -B ~/$XDG_DATA_HOME/qutebrowser-profiles/python docs.python.org --target window --loglevel info

Disclaimer

This is alpha-quality software. Even though it doesn't do anything particularly dangerous to the filesystem, there is always the risk that it will mangle your data.

Future work

• More shared config and data (configurable)
• Generated binaries and .desktop files
• The ability to delete profiles (need tests first!)
• Use any profile as a base for new profiles (currently only the main profile in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is supported)
• Source autoconfig.yml instead of config.py
• Customizable config sourcing for those who like to split their config into multiple files
• Bundled config file optimized for single-site browsing
• qpm.conf to configure the features above

Known limitations

• If your config relies on config.configdir to dynamically source other config files (I may be the only person who does this), those config files will not be present in qpm-created profiles There are plenty of workarounds, such as hardcoding your main config dir instead of using config.configdir.