Translator, Phone Connect, Feeds, Reddit and Home Assistant are bundled with Mandara and start switched off. Turn them on in Studio → Plugins; open a plugin’s Settings to configure it. They load data when you open their panels. Closing a panel stops its refresh timer.
Choose DeepL Free, DeepL Pro or LibreTranslate. DeepL uses its official API server and needs your own API key. LibreTranslate uses the server address you enter; enable Use an API key only if that server requires one. Addresses can include a reverse proxy path.
API keys require HTTPS for remote servers. For a local HTTP server, use
localhost or its private IP address; other hostnames require HTTPS. Local
HTTP does not encrypt API keys or Home Assistant tokens, so use it only
on a trusted network.
Save the key in the plugin’s masked keyring field. Keys live in your desktop’s Secret Service keyring, scoped to the provider and server, and stay out of Mandara’s configuration and request URLs. Removing a key removes only that provider’s key for that server. A locked keyring is reported without opening an unlock prompt just because a panel opened. Key changes finish one at a time, even if settings are closed and reopened.
Choose source and target languages from your provider’s current list. Detect automatically leaves the source to the provider. Type or explicitly paste text, then press Translate. Typing never submits text, and copying a result needs an explicit click. Text and results stay in memory. A translation can contain up to 5,000 characters. Your selected provider receives the submitted text; its account limits and privacy policy apply.
Install KDE Connect from your distribution and its companion app on your
phone. Open KDE Connect once if your desktop has not started its daemon.
The package is kdeconnect on Arch and Debian, and kde-connect on Fedora.
KDE Connect is optional and is not installed for people who do not use it.
Open Phone Connect to see the devices the local KDE Connect daemon knows about. Pairing requires confirmation; incoming requests offer Accept and Reject. A paired, reachable device can report its real battery level and offer Ring, Ping or Send clipboard text, depending on the device’s enabled capabilities. Clipboard text is read and sent only when you press that button. Forget device asks for confirmation.
This complements Share to phone’s one-time QR transfers: it uses an existing paired KDE Connect connection rather than creating a web share.
A reader for RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0, Atom and JSON Feed. The bar item shows how many articles are unread (as a badge, a number or a dot: Studio → Plugins → Feeds → Settings → Unread count). The panel has a sidebar with All articles, Saved articles, your folders and feeds, each with its unread count, and one timeline of article cards: the feed’s icon and colour, how long ago it was published, an unread dot, the title, a short excerpt and the feed’s thumbnail. Search finds words in titles, excerpts, authors and feed names; All | Unread filters the list. The toolbar refreshes every feed, marks everything in the selected list read and opens the settings.
Reading. Click a card (or press Enter) to open it in the reader: a clean copy of the article drawn with Mandara’s own text, without scripts, frames, forms, embedded media or tracking pixels, and with only web links. Its toolbar saves the article for later, marks it read or unread, copies the link and opens it in your browser. Open articles in can send articles straight to the browser instead. Opening an article marks it read (Mark read when opened). Keys: ↑ ↓ or J K move, Enter opens, Esc goes back, O opens the browser, M toggles read, S saves, C copies the link, R refreshes and / searches.
Sidebar card. Add Feeds to the sidebar (Studio → Bars → Sidebar) for a card with the newest unread articles, each with its feed’s monogram and colour, how long ago it came out and an unread dot. Card folder limits it to one folder. Clicking an article opens it in the panel’s reader; the header opens the panel. The card never downloads anything: it shows what the panel last fetched, and lets go of its rows when the sidebar hides.
Pictures. Pictures chooses None, Icons and thumbnails (the default: the feed’s icon and the thumbnails the feed declares) or Also inside articles, which loads pictures inside the reader from their websites. Only pictures on screen load, decoded at the size they are drawn, and a small disk cache keeps them for next time.
Adding feeds. Studio → Plugins → Feeds → Settings → Your feeds: type
a site or feed address and Add. For a site, Mandara reads the feed its
page announces (or tries the usual addresses such as /feed and
/atom.xml); a site with several feeds lets you pick. Each feed can be
renamed, put in a folder, given a colour, moved up or down and removed.
Starter feeds lists popular feeds by topic (technology, Linux and open
source, programming, science, world news, Arabic news, design and fun),
each checked to download and read correctly. Import and export reads
and writes OPML files from and for other feed readers. In the launcher,
typing a web address offers Subscribe in Feeds, and mandara msg feeds
subscribe <address> does the same (both turn Feeds on). Up to 64 feeds.
Refreshing. Nothing downloads while nothing shows the feeds. When you open the panel, feeds older than Refresh while open (five minutes by default) refresh, three at a time; the Refresh button fetches all of them. Refresh in the background (off by default) keeps the unread count current with one coalesced refresh every Background interval (an hour by default, never more often than every 15 minutes), and Notify about new articles (off by default) sends one notification for what is new, at most every 30 minutes and never while the panel is open. Requests are compressed, reuse the server’s ETag and modification date, follow up to five redirects (only to web addresses, never from https down to http, and a permanent move is remembered), and respect a busy server’s Retry-After. A feed that fails waits longer before each new try, from five minutes up to six hours, and the panel says when it will try again; the last articles stay readable meanwhile.
History. Each feed keeps its newest Articles per feed (50 by
default) plus every saved article. Articles that leave the feed stay for
Keep old articles for (14 days by default); saved ones stay until you
remove them. Read and saved flags, the articles and cleaned-up article
text (up to 2 MiB per feed) stay on this computer, in
~/.local/state/mandara/feeds/, with owner-only permissions. The panel
loads them when it opens and lets go of them, and of every decoded
picture, shortly after it closes; the bar keeps only the counts.
Feed lists from earlier versions (space-separated addresses) keep working and move to the new list the first time you change it in Studio.
Read your communities, their posts and comment threads in a panel.
Two modes. Reddit stopped answering anonymous .json requests in
2026 (they return 403). The plugin works either way:
/r/<name>/<sort>/.rss and each post’s comments feed). Reddit allows
about one anonymous feed request a minute, so Mandara asks at most once
a minute for the whole shell, waits longer when Reddit’s
X-Ratelimit-* headers or a 429 Retry-After say so, and never sends
a burst. One queue serves the panel and the sidebar card: the view you
asked for last goes first, and an older waiting request is replaced
instead of piling up. Every feed is kept five minutes. The feeds carry
titles, authors, links, times and the post or comment text (a picture
post links to its picture, which shows); they carry no scores, comment
counts or reply structure, so those are left out and comments read as
one list. A banner says so, with the steps to full mode.http://localhost as
the redirect address.Installed apps have no secret, and Mandara never signs in as you: it asks
for an application-only token (Reddit’s documented installed_client
grant, with the anonymous device id), keeps it in memory for at most an
hour and never writes it to disk. This grant has no refresh token: a
new token is simply requested a minute before the old one expires, and
once more if Reddit answers 401, with nothing for you to do. If Reddit
refuses the client id, the plugin switches to limited mode until you
change it; if a renewal fails for another reason, that request reads the
public feeds and the app is tried again next time, so you never get an
error wall. Reddit may ask new apps to be approved under its Responsible
Builder Policy. The optional Your Reddit user name only goes into the
request’s user agent, as Reddit asks of developers.
Opening it. Add Reddit to a bar in Studio → Bars for a bar button, or
type reddit, subreddit or r/linux in the launcher
(mandara msg reddit open r/linux); without a bar button the panel
opens as a floating card.
Browsing. Your communities sit along the top (add, remove and reorder them in Discover, which also has a starter list by topic). Sort by hot, new, top rated (with its time range) or rising, search within a community, and load more pages as you reach the end of the list; posts already shown are never fetched again and never repeated. Cards show the title, score, comment count, flair, author and age with a thumbnail; the compact layout fits more, and the grid puts pictures first in two or three columns (the panel widens for it). The layout button in the panel’s header switches between them, and remembers your choice. Opening a post shows its picture or gallery, its link or a button for videos (which play in your browser), its text and its comments: fold a reply chain by its header, load hidden replies and continue long threads in place. Every post can be opened in the browser, and its link copied.
Sidebar card. Add Reddit to a sidebar tab (Studio → Bars) for the first five posts of a community (Studio → Plugins → Reddit → Sidebar card community, or your first community), with scores where available. A click opens the post in the panel. The card asks only while it is shown, at most every ten minutes, through the same queue as the panel, and forgets its posts when the sidebar hides.
Safety. NSFW posts are hidden by default (Studio can blur them
instead, or show them). Spoilers are covered, pictures blurred and
>!spoiler!< text masked, until you reveal them. Post and comment text
is Reddit’s Markdown drawn as the shell’s own text: raw HTML stays plain
text, and only web links (and Reddit’s own /r/ and /u/ links) open.
Pictures come only from Reddit’s image hosts.
Requests. One worker serves the panel, one request at a time; a new
sort or community replaces a waiting request, and leaving a post drops
its result. Every reply’s X-Ratelimit-* headers are tracked: when the
window is used up, or after a 429, the panel waits (honouring
Retry-After, longer after repeated 429s, at most five minutes) and
says so instead of retrying. A page you just read is reused for two
minutes. Nothing refreshes while the panel is closed; Refresh an open
list (off by default) refreshes only the list on screen.
MANDARA_REDDIT_API=http://127.0.0.1:PORT points the plugin at a local
test server (loopback only), as the sandbox screenshots do.
Enter your Home Assistant address and save a long-lived access token through the plugin’s keyring field. Create a token in your Home Assistant profile. Keep the server address and token for the same instance.
Enter up to 24 favourite entity ids, separated by spaces, to choose their order. Favourites load individually, so a large installation does not need to download every state. Removed entities are skipped; connection and authentication errors are reported. Leave the field empty to discover up to 512 available entities. Sensors show real states and units. Lights, switches, fans and input booleans offer a toggle; scenes, scripts and buttons offer activation. An unavailable entity cannot be controlled. Scenes and buttons can still run before they have a last-used time; an unknown sensor value stays unknown. Locks and other unsupported domains stay read-only.
Actions call Home Assistant’s actual services and refresh the result. They do not create synthetic states. The panel refreshes only while open, from every five seconds to every five minutes. Changing servers clears the old server’s displayed values and uses a separately scoped key.
See Commands for the same explicit actions over IPC. Network requests respect Mandara’s offline mode, have bounded responses and timeouts, and never follow redirects with API keys.