Hi everyone,
as the title goes, I'm trying to build my own custom desktop here and I have a couple of quick questions for you:

1) The whole point of the custom desktop is to "free" myself from kde libs and gnome and xfce, etc. as I'm looking for a really modular and flexible desktop. So I wonder, is there any site/link where I can find a list of desktop-independent software? I haven't found much.

2) I'm a KDE user and I love Dolphin. I don't care much about looks and aesthetics, but the split window and integrated terminal are the most handy features I've found in a file manager. Do you know of another file manager that has this kind of thing?

All answers are welcome.
See ya!

You can try just openbox, fvwm (old). You can also try LXDE.

Desktop independent softwares should require only GUI toolkits namely gtk+ or Qt or EFL or Fltk or Xlib/Xcb. You should search for GUI toolkits. And for applications using these toolkits only, you would have to read their documentations. Some site like BLFS/CBLFS list required dependencies of software. They may help. If you have skill you can also look at build scripts of popular distros like gentoo, archlinux, debian, fedora for software and their dependencies.

For 2nd question there is pcmanfm file manager.

SpaceFM

My low resource Custom Desktop setup

Which is just Icewm with hot key combos and a kicker launcher/

A look at all of the window managers available might be in order:

http://gilesorr.org/wm/table.html

When I'm trying to build a really light system, I like to eliminate all gtk and qt apps and libraries. My favorite window managers these days are fluxbox, jwm, icewm, spectrwm, cwm, and i3.

Xfe is a great file manager that doesn't have gtk/qt dependencies.

This is a good start for information about window managers:
http://xwinman.org/

For a window manager with a reasonable supply of built-in facilities (e.g. a panel with pager and clock), try Icewm (my favourite) or Jwm. For a very minimal start, one of the "boxes": Fluxbox and Openbox are the best supported. All are easy to configure and free of oddities (unlike, say, Fvwm or Wmii).

A search for "linux file managers" will give a lot of useful guides.

1 members found this post helpful.

if you want "custom "
there is E19
https://www.enlightenment.org/

but a word of warning

if you are already using a KDE dark theme
reset the OS to use the DEFAULT

before loging into e19
if you do NOT you will not be able to use it
black text on black windows with black outlines is very hadr to use

Thanks all for the replies!
Indeed I was messing with Openbox for a start.
Didn't know about EFL, though, sounds quite interesting (I'll sure give it a try)
And I did hear about PCMan & Xfe, but never dared trying them

Is it ok to have "mixed" toolkits, i.e. having gtk, qt and efl applications running all simultaneously?
Or is it recommended to have a single toolkit kind of desktop?

Having a mixture of toolkits is fine. In fact, it's quite rare to have no GTK application running on a KDE system.

PCMan is a good basic file manager: the commonest one supplied with those distros which come without a full desktop.

I didn't recommend Enlightenment because it can be a pain to configure, since the documentation tends to be for developers rather than users. The initial setup can be odd; the last time I used it Alt+F4 switched my program window to workspace 4 rather than closing it. Like Gnome, it stores all the configuration data in a binary file which needs a special tool to access: a horrid un-Unix-like practice.

Just for the heck of it I will mention ratpoison. If you haven't already I would recommend trying it out (after reading some documentation first) just to see what it's like.