A Many-Widget Terminal (or: How to Clone Wave Term in 2 Days Using KDE Apps)(bait, bait)

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:

Many-terminal screenshot

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.

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Yeah, I experimented a bit on that path, using a tiling Wayland Compositor (Sway) to build an ad-hoc IDE with panels and window tabs.

Interesting, I tried and failed to use Hyprland for this but I hadn’t tried Sway. It looks like a better choice than KWin for this, as a natively tiling WM.

Did you also run into clipboard issues? I’m starting to wonder if mine are caused by my playing with WMs or appeared recently for a different reason :thinking: