Adding Bitbar functionality to Plasma

[David Edmundson]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:44 AM Lasath Fernando <kde at lasath.org> wrote:

> Hello There!
>
> I don't know if any of you remember me -
>

Of course!

it's been many years since I made any contributions to KDE. However, I
> would like to change that! :D
> Recently, I became the maintainer for a plasma applet called "Kargos":
> https://github.com/lipido/kargos
> It's a Plasma port of Mac OSX's BitBar: https://github.com/matryer/bitbar
> (I tried to include a screenshot, but it looks like these mailing lists
> have a limit of 40KB)
>
> Those github pages give a lot of detail about exactly what it does and how
> to use it, but the short version is that it runs a given script
> periodically and displays the stdout in a panel.
> This has made Plasma applets much more accessible to anyone that knows
> programming (or even shell scripting), as they can simply instantiate this
> to watch something. (No need to worry about Ui/Layout logic or Qt/QML at
> all).
>
> However, I believe this kind of functionality should be built into Plasma
> itself, rather than being a far-away applet users have to stumble upon.
> (Kind of like how the earlier versions of Chrome included direct support
> for Firefox's Greasemonkey scripts without users having to install the
> Greasemonkey plugin ;-)
>
> First of all, I would like the Plasma team's blessing before I start doing
> any significant amount of work on this.
>

It existing somewhere as a thing. Sure.

I'm not sure how much we want to treat it as a super first class citizen,
given output will never look as native or be as dynamic.
I don't think we want any of our main applets written in it, but supporting
it like we support the web slice as a plasmoid, seems pretty sensible.


> Secondly, (assuming I have the first), I would like to hear your thoughts
> on the best architecture for it.
>

Currently it's an applet right? It seems like a sensible design as it
shields the shell from caring about the applet internals which I like.

What are the specific problems with this that we want to address?

David
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20200921/7f68a013/attachment.htm>