qbpm (qutebrowser profile manager) is a tool for creating, managing,
and running qutebrowser
profiles. Profile support isn’t built in to qutebrowser, at least not
directly, but it does have 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. Profiles can be run by starting qutebrowser with the appropriate
--basedir, or more conveniently using the
qbpm launch and qbpm choose commands.
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
To create a new profile called “python” and launch it with the python
docs open:
$ qbpm new python
$ qbpm launch python docs.python.org
Note that all arguments after qbpm launch PROFILE are
passed to qutebrowser, so options can be passed too:
qbpm launch python --target window pypi.org.
If you have multiple profiles you can use qbpm choose to
bring up a list of profiles and select one to launch. Depending on what
your system has available the menu may be dmenu,
fuzzel, fzf, an applescript dialog, or one of
many other menu programs qbpm can detect. Any dmenu-compatible menu can
be used with --menu,
e.g. qbpm choose --menu 'fuzzel --dmenu'. As with
qbpm launch, extra arguments are passed to qutebrowser.
Run qbpm --help to see other available commands.
By default when you create a new profile a .desktop file
is created that launches the profile. This launcher does not depend on
qbpm at all, so if you want you can run qbpm new once and
keep using the profile without needing qbpm installed on your
system.
Installation
If you use Nix, you can install or run qbpm as a Nix flake. For example, to run
qbpm without installing it you can use
nix run github:pvsr/qbpm -- new my-profile.
On Arch and derivatives, you can install the AUR package: qbpm-git.
Otherwise you can install directly from PyPI using uv, pip, or your
preferred client. With uv it’s uv tool run qbpm to run qbpm
without installing and uv tool install qbpm to install to
~/.local/bin. The downside of going through PyPI is that
the man
page and shell completions will not be installed automatically.
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 uv will install qbpm as a command-line application, but if
you want a native Mac application you can download contrib/qbpm.platypus,
install platypus, and
create a qbpm app with
platypus -P qbpm.platypus /Applications/qbpm.app. That will
also make qbpm available 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.