Botnik

An LLM-driven Wayland desktop manager. Instead of traditional window management, Botnik presents a chat prompt. A locally-running LLM interprets your requests and controls the desktop — opening apps, arranging windows, managing files — via tool calls.

Current state

v0.1: A minimal Qt6 Wayland compositor that renders a fullscreen chat interface and streams responses from a local LLM via Ollama.

Prerequisites

• Qt6 with Wayland Compositor module (sudo apt install qt6-wayland-dev)
• Ollama with a model pulled (e.g. ollama pull qwen2.5:7b)

Build and run

cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/botnik

When running nested inside an existing X11 session:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./build/botnik

Headless mode

Run botnik without a GUI window using the --headless flag or BOTNIK_HEADLESS=1 environment variable:

./build/botnik --headless

In headless mode, the compositor runs against Qt's offscreen platform. Chat interaction happens via stdin/stdout: type a message on stdin (one line per message), and the assistant's response streams to stdout. Sending EOF (Ctrl-D or closing the pipe) triggers a clean exit.

Testing

A headless test script verifies the build and basic functionality:

bash scripts/test-headless.sh

Exit code 0 means all tests passed. The script:

1. Builds botnik (cmake -B build && cmake --build build)
2. Tests startup and clean shutdown via EOF
3. Tests that the process stays alive while stdin is open
4. If Ollama is reachable, sends a chat message and verifies a response arrives

Tests that require Ollama are skipped (not failed) when Ollama is not running.

Architecture

• Compositor (src/compositor.*) — Minimal QWaylandCompositor subclass. Owns the display output.
• Chat UI (qml/Main.qml) — Fullscreen QML chat log with text input. Solarized dark theme.
• Chat model (src/chatmodel.*) — QAbstractListModel backing the message list.
• Ollama client (src/ollamaclient.*) — Streams responses from a local Ollama instance via HTTP.

The design intent is that the LLM will eventually control all window management through MCP tools. The compositor is a canvas the model paints on.