Bug 449400

The idea is to be able to take any regular window and make it act like a plasmoid, instead of having to create a plasmoid from scratch. Currently with window rules it is possible to get quite close, by making the window stay below other windows, making it appear across all virtual desktops, fixing the position and size, and so on, however using the show desktop effect would of course still hide it since it is still a window.

A couple of use cases relevant to me for this would be to have a terminal that displays htop (which some may prefer instead of the system monitor widgets), and having Elisa's full interface (since its design is responsive it works even when shrunk) accessible anytime instead of having to track it down, leaving a virtual desktop just for it and/or having yet another system tray icon. While simply writing plasmoids for these is probably the ideal solution for proper integration and whatnot it seems like a shame if there are apps that do the job well already. Other use cases I can think of would be for apps like Discord and Signal, where writing a plasmoid might mean reimplementing a lot of things that the apps already do, like protocols and whatnot.

Now I understand that this might well complicate things significantly under the hood and is likely very niche to say the least, so feel free to close this if it's not worth the hassle it would entail, I just thought it'd be a nice to have, definitely no dealbreaker for me.

Also, while searching for possible duplicates I noticed that this is already sort of possible thanks to bug 406101, although of course keeping the to-be-plasmoid window above others wouldn't work.


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.90.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2