"Peek Desktop" button on taskbar

[Duncan]

Dave Close posted on Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:46:15 -0700 as excerpted:

> Martin von Reichenberg wrote:
> 
>>The only way to remove any widget or applet from the KDE desktop taskbar
>>is via Right Mouse Click -> Show Panel Configuration -> Hoover with the
>>Mouse Cursor to see pop-up window with option for each widget/applet ->
>>Remove
> 
> Thanks. That worked. Clearly I mixed up some of the steps.

Glad it worked, but for the record should other users come across this 
thread and need it...

While the above is the most direct removal method, there is a second 
method, with the caveat that it removes all running instances of the 
plasmoid/widget in question at once, which might be undesired if you have 
several running and only want to remove one, but OTOH, if there's one 
running that somehow got dragged off-screen or something (as I've done 
occasionally), it may be the only way to remove it since you can't see it 
to get at the remove button.

Right-click the desktop > Enter edit mode (or otherwise enter edit mode if 
you've reconfigured the usual context menu to do it with another action, 
here, middle-click activates it).  In edit mode, find Add or Manage 
Widgets (there should be an entry at the top of the desktop window 
displaying the wallpaper, or you can get to it from the configure button 
on a panel) and activate it.

In the resulting Widgets explorer window, click on the filter button and 
choose running, thus displaying only the running plasmoids/widgets.

Hovering over each one should display the number running on the top left, 
and a broom icon on the top right.  That broom icon is the cleanup 
button.  Click it to remove all running instances of that widget, 
regardless of whether they're on the desktop or a panel.

As I said I've had running instances get "lost" occasionally somehow, so 
there wasn't an individual plasmoid/widget remove button available to 
click, and that was the way I removed them.

(Of course the /other/ way is to do it manually, editing the text-based 
plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc config file itself with a text 
editor.  It's normally found in ~/.config (or in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if you 
point that elsewhere than the default).  But make a backup of the file 
first just in case you screw up the edit.  Unfortunately that file, while 
text-based, is rather complex in organization and it isn't the simplest to 
find what you want to edit or remove therein.  But it's possible and I've 
had to resort to that occasionally when some bit of the config got 
corrupted or something, that being more likely here than for many since I 
run live-git and thus sometimes find bugs to report and hopefully get 
fixed before they make it to a release.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman