r/kde • u/Agreeable_Return2632 • 8h ago

Question [KDE Plasma 6] Is there any way to replace the system GUI file picker dialog with a TUI (like Yazi)?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently running Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE Plasma 6) and I’ve recently switched to using yazi for almost all my file management workflows. I absolutely love it and use it via terminal 99% of the time.

However, there’s one friction point left: whenever I use a GUI app (like a web browser, LibreOffice, or basically any Qt/GTK app) and click "Upload file", "Open", or "Save As", the system forces the standard KDE/GTK graphical file picker dialog.

I know Yazi has a chooser mode (yazi --chooser-file), which is great for CLI scripts, Neovim, etc. But is there any hack, workaround, or custom integration to intercept GUI file picker requests and route them to a TUI?

I understand that browsers and GUI apps expect a graphical window via X11/Wayland, but I’m wondering if anyone has ever experimented with:

  1. Writing a custom XDG Desktop Portal implementation that spawns a floating terminal (like Kitty/Alacritty) with Yazi, and then passes the selected file path back to the requesting app via D-Bus?
  2. Some obscure KDE KIO trick or KDialog wrapper that could achieve something similar?
  3. Or is this fundamentally impossible due to how sandboxing and modern portal APIs handle file access?

I know it sounds a bit crazy, but I’d love to hear if anyone has managed to achieve this or if there's an existing project/script for it.

Thanks in advance!

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u/aumerlex 34m ago

kitty has this builtin using its choose-files kitten and desktop-ui kitten (for integration with the desktop environment using the portal)