Arch Linux

wilted.black.rose

Member

Registered: 2022-07-01

Posts: 10

Terminal love

I'm relatively new to linux (~6 months), but I have developed a great love for the terminal. I am thinking about customizing my desktop (bspwm) in a way that there is no wallpaper, but only a permanently open terminal on every virtual desktop by default. How would you go about doing that? I still want my terminal to be tiling as usual, just not be completely closeable (or rather when it is finally killed, it simply gets replaced with a fresh process). At the same time I want any other applications not to be tiled in half when I open them as the first application on a virtual desktop. Any suggestions on how to accomplish that, or where to look in order to implement that is greatly appretiated.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,497

Website

Re: Terminal love

It sounds like you want a terminal as a desktop-layer window.  I've seen a few tools in the past that do this, but never had any interest in them so I don't remember them off hand.  There are also a couple terminals that are made for related purposes that could likely be configured for this goal, notably guake comes to mind (though I've never used it).

The biggest challenge you'll run into is the focus model: if the terminal doesn't get resized / tiled, then when any other window is open, the terminal will be behind the other window.  Will you want to be able to type in the terminal when any other window is open?  If not, then this is not much of a problem, but if so, the terminal would have to be assigned input focus while not being raised - and there must be some mechanism to assign input focus to the terminal.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman