what I want in a graphical environment

In my GUI/Desktop/windowing environment, I want the following:

• terminal emulator
• browser
• image viewer¹
• video/music player¹
• ps/pdf viewer¹
• primary and selection copy/paste
• be able to ctrl-click on links in terminal and open in browser
• split view, overlapping view, and maximised view

[¹]: browser could possibly be used instead

That's 99% of everything.

Also nice:

• status bar with a clock and battery indicator for laptop, but to be honest I usually just run date to find the time
• drop-down terminal emulator which can be maximised, I use this a lot.
• be able to open new tab in existing browser process by doing eg. firefox https://example.com, but this usually requires D-Bus; ick.

The sad truth is that a browser is the only "program" that I can't adequately run in a terminal, but of course it's closer to a terminal itself, in that it exists to run a huge number of many different types of apps.

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written 2022-04-27

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