I recently discovered Wave Terminal, a terminal with graphical tools such as a browser and a file manager built-in as widgets. It is a cool project; you should check it out. It is also in beta, and has many rough edges and basic features missing.
Wave is, I believe, built from scratch, and I thought assembling it using an existing set of components would produce something with immediately more stable and featureful widgets.
So as a proof of concept, I made Many:
I used a nested KWin instance with the Kröhnkite tiling script, and a few KDE apps as widgets: Dolphin, Falkon, Kate, and, of course, Konsole. But I could have got a similar result with different components.
The apps have a separate XDG_CONFIG_HOME
, which makes it possible to configure them into minimal layouts, so they can play their role of widgets without adding too much clutter.
They run in a separate DBus session to avoid key binding issues (though I’m not out of that pit yet), so clipboard synchronization is needed using ClipCascade.
Top unsolved problem: closing the apps gracefully when the KWin instance is closed, and saving their layout.
Many is the opposite of production-ready, but I would love to know what people think of the concept.