[kde-community] Plasmoids and Apps - was - Re: Applications in KDE Generation 5

Kevin Krammer krammer at kde.org
Thu Jan 16 11:16:17 GMT 2014


On Thursday, 2014-01-16, 12:05:17, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Thursday, January 16, 2014 11:46:33 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > On Thursday, 2014-01-16, 10:43:42, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > I also thought about plasma-windowed when reading that :)
> > 
> > However, I think it is one of those "hidden gems" that nobody knows about.
> > I've had questions like "can I run $applet stand-alone" on the user
> > support
> > lists a couple of times and plasma-windowed was the answer.
> > 
> > Its drawback currently is that it is not very easy to figure out what to
> > pass as its commandline argument.
> 
> KRunner will do this for you, actually. If you type “calc”, and the plasmoid
> runner is installed, you’ll get a match offering to run the plasmoid in a
> window. Well, it doesn’t  actually *say* that, since that’s jargon, but
> that’s what the match does.

See, another hidden gem :)

For the original problem with plasma-windowed I would imagine something like a 
"list" mode (like kcmshell4 --list) or a mode where it starts with the applet 
picker.

> For plasmoids suited to being run as an app they should also install a
> .desktop file with this command in it so that it is completely transparent
> to the user.

Right.
The applet that is most often asked for when this comes up in the user list is 
the networkmanagment btw.

> > > which allows these components to make useful adjustments between being
> > > embedded as a plasmoid component and being run as a top-level window.
> > 
> > Wow, nice! I don't think I've ever heard about this before and I am even
> > monitoring plasma-devel.
> 
> We did it for Plasma Active because we found ourselves needing it there. I
> know it was blogged about by both myself and Marco (perhaps others?), but
> blogs are indeed easily missed.

It is hard to stay up to date with all areas because so much is going on 
everywhere, so I wouldn't put is past me that I had even missed it on plasma-
devel or plasma-active.

Just wanting to put forward that even long term core contributors are easily 
unaware of options. One of the bonus points of doing user support is that one 
is constantly in search of them :)

> It should become more visible with Qt5 where
> (as you note below) we can realistically start creating full desktop apps
> with QML, making the lines are blurry enough on Desktop to start using it
> there. In Active, the lines are already blurry / non-existent ... but more
> people use Desktop still ;)

:)

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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