In Plasma, when the user wants to do some significant layout change in the desktop, such as adding, moving or removing panels or add and manage desktop widgets, will go in the so called “edit mode”, by a context menu entry when driven by mouse, or by long-press in the desktop when driven by touchscreen.
Let me introduce you the improved edit mode workflow Plasma 6.1 will have:
An “edit mode” is necessary because since is an operation potentially destructive, we really want to avoid the user to for instance remove their own taskbar or some similar operation by mistake, during day to day use.
“Modes” in UI are a delicate thing: they have advantage as well many possible problems, which come in when it’s not immediately clear in which mode the user is in, and can try to use the UI as it was “in the other mode” (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/ as a quick introduction on advantages and disadvantages of modes).
This was a bit of a problem of the edit mode in plasma, as the edit mode was not clearly visually separated with the normal UI workflow of the day to day plasma usage.
Another problem present was that the action buttons of the edit mode toolbar were often hidden away by either the panel configuration window or the add widgets sidebar.
This new mode zooms out the desktop with the same visual effect of the window overview effect (yay for consistency), to well differentiate between normal and edit mode. Using the same zoom effect it puts the whole desktop “out of the way” when either the add widget sidebar of the panel configuration window appear, making sure the whole desktop area is always reachable, applets can be dropped anywhere in the desktop and the edit mode toolbar is always completely accessible.
Editing, moving and customizing widgets in Plasma Desktop improved a lot in 5.17, and then in 5.18 it will get a brand new edit mode, to be really efficient editing your desktop layout (and have less visual noise by default).
This week another new feature landed in the edit mode for 5.18: it’s possible to set some plasmoids without background and a nice drop shadow, for an extra clean and modern look for your desktop.
In addition, a plasmoid can specify this backgroundless shadowed mode as its new default, like the digital clock now does (when is on the deskop)
Applet developers will have to opt in this feature: doesn’t always make sense everywhere and some may still be buggy. Some default plasmoids, especially in kdeplasma-addons have been set to support it.
If you are writing a plasmoid and want to support this background removal, in the main QML item of your plasmoid you can do:
A new release of Kirigami is about to come with the new version of KDE Frameworks about to be released, 5.38.
This is an important release, which bumps the import version to 2.2, because has a very important new feature: A brand new (but retrocompatible) color theming API, which allows different areas of the application to have different color domains, allowing for instance parts of the application to have a light color palette and parts of the application to have a dark one.
This model is modeled after KColorScheme which is very powerful (even tough sometimes underused): as KcolorScheme will be actually used when running on Plasma Desktop (just a runtime plugin, it won’t depend on it, so dependencies on Android or other platforms are not affected) it will allow us to integrate tightly with the other applications made by KDE.
Here you can see the example Kirigami Gallery which has been set to use different color sets in different areas:
Kirigami Gallery with the Breeze widget style: areas with a different ColorSet, widget and icon colors following
Here, this is how choosing different color sets for different areas of the application looks on Android, using the Material style:
Theme.colorSet
The Theme object in Kirigami used to be a singleton (and still is, for full compatibility when the 2.0 or 2.1 version of the import is used), but is now instead an attached property: which is source-compatible (no rewrite needed in your apps, except bumping the import version to 2.2)
You can color differently an area of you application with the following code:
Item {
// tells the Theme no not inherit the color set from parent objects
Kirigami.Theme.inherit: false
// uses Complementary color set
Kirigami.Theme.colorSet: Kirigami.Theme.Complementary
Rectangle {
//this color will come from the Complementary set
color: Kirigami.Theme.backgroundColor
}
}
Another example of a (very minimal) full application which has the Global Drawer in the Complementary color set:
In the above screenshot, you can also see that the icons used there are colored accordingly to the same text color of the ColorSet of the area they are in. When loading in Plasma Desktop, we have the luxury of loading such icons with KIconLoader, which can process SVG-based icon sets with stylesheets, so we can actually have in the icons areas colored with particular named-colors, which correspond with the Theme’s named colors (like textColor, backgroundColor, highlightColor, negativeTextColor and so on) for instance is important that a record icon like the one shown in the screenshot has a red dot as this is the universal accepted iconography. The monochrome icons in the Breeze icon set are “almost” monochrome, with those few colored accents used very sparsely, just when really needed and give definitely a nice touch of polish to the visual identity.
On other platforms they are just treated as monochorome and the whole icon is colored.
Better integration with Plasma Desktop and QWidget style
A QtQuickControls2 style has been written which uses QStyle to paint controls and will be used by default in next Plasma releases (from 5.11 onwards), this is released as a framework as well in 5.39, called qqc2-desktop-style
Here a screenshot of the Gallery using Oxygen widget style and icons:
Kirigami Gallery on desktop, shown with the Oxygen widget style
Different platforms plugins
The framework qqc2-desktop-style also contains a plugin that is dynamically loaded by Kirigami, which bridget the Kirigami Theme.* concept to KColorScheme, making Kirigami apps follow the same palette, as well as using KIconloader to load icons, being capable to apply color stylesheets to Breeze icons.
On other platforms, simpler plugins will be used to not drag dependencies and integrate better on whatever platform they are (like Material on Android)
What about fancy icons on my QWidget app?
Since several KF5 releases, Breeze icons in QWidget-based apps can follow the system palette, so when using a dark color scheme, icons will become white and so on. However: what about using a light color scheme in some areas and a dark one in some other areas?
Since 5.39 KIconLoader has gained a new method, setCustomPalette(), in which you can override the colors for a particular KIconLoader (the app will then need to use different KIconloader instances intended for different areas of the app). Pay attention that in that case you will have to monitor the QApplication palette change and eventually update that kiconloader palette by hand.
One of the key points of Plasma is while giving a simple default desktop experience, not limiting the user to that single, pre-packed one size fits all UI.
Its strength is to be flexible to greatly different user needs, “Simple by default, powerful when needed”.
Several years ago, the Visual Design Group had the idea of making easy to build and share desktop layouts to make easy to test wildly different user interfaces, see this old post by Thomas on the topic.
Since then, work on it has been going on, mostly on the infrastructure needed to make it a reality, and in Plasma 5.8 the first pieces are there, tough still far from the complete experience we want to offer.
The support for Look and Feel packages is there since a while (5.3 or so) that’s what one of those package can do:
Provide a default layout for when Plasma starts for the first time, it was used for distributions to personalise their UI, but now is easier for users as well.
Provide some default look options, like what color scheme to use, what icon theme etc
(advanced) provide the actual implementation of some UI, such as KRunner, the Alt+Tab window switcher dialog, the lock screen
So far the default Plasma layout provided by the Look and Feel theme was used only when starting up for the first time, on a clean user home (therefore very useful for distributions) but sice Plasma 5.8, in the Workspace theme -> Look & Feel section of system settings there is an option to load the new layout when switching the look and feel theme. Not as default as is a destructive action that will remove your current Desktop setup.
The other component is a tiny little application shipped in the “Plasma Sdk” package that’s called lookandfeelexplorer.
With this applciation you can:
Create a new Look and Feel theme
Edit the metadata and thumbnail of a locally created/installed theme
Create a default javascript desktop layout based upon your current Plasma setup
Create a defaults file based upon your current setup as well, such as color scheme and icon theme
The last two are the central part of sharing your idea of “the perfect desktop” with others, linked with the integration between the Look & Feel systemsetting module and the KDE store, also new in Plasma 5.8.
It’s still a preliminary feature, as ideally in the future if your shared Look & Feel theme depends for instance from a particular icon theme or a particular 3rd party plasmoid, the store integration will download those dependencies as well.
In the screenshot below, the desktop/Breeze-looking scrollbar it’s actually a control coming from QtQuickControls2.
Since one of the goals of Kirigami is to support also desktop applications, while working on Kirigami 2 (that is mostly porting it to be based on top of QtQuickControls2) I had the need for it to continue to integrate with desktop applications as well.
Unfortunately, desktops are not the primary target for QtQuickcontrls2, and while in Qt 5.9 some much needed desktop-related features, such as mouseover effects are getting back in, being as unrecognizable as possible with QWidget-based applications is definitely not in the roadmap.
Luckily, theming QQC2 is easy, so I’ve started a QtQuickControls2 style that integrates with desktop QStyle-based widgets (actually, based upon the QtQuickControls1 QStyle painter machinery).
If we are serious in using QtQuickControls2 in applications shipped together Plasma, we also must make sure they integrate well with the Plasma desktop’s Breeze look and feel.
I started by theming the scrollbar because I felt it was one of the hardest controls to do.
in QtQuickControls2 the scrollbars are supposed to be an attached property of flickables..
This is pretty simple for the mobile use case, turns out it’s a nightmare to create scrollbars that behave like we are used to in the desktop (unless you’re on mac, which insists to look more and more like iOS), which need to be
always visible
have optional little arrow buttons for increment/decrenent
be besides the flickable, not overlapping the contents, because again, they’re always visible
use the global desktop theme
I’ve been able to do all of the following, tough it’s necessary to reintroduce the QtQuickcontrols1 component called ScrollView (which imo was a mistake to remove in QtQuickControls2) which can correctly lay out and size the Flickable relative to its ScrollBar.
Hopefully, you’ll be soon able to build an application with QtQuickcontrols2 and Kirigami2 that feels right at home in a Plasma desktop.
What about Plasma-themed QQC2 controls for plasmoids? that will come too, of course!
Breeze icons are very simple SVG files, especially the ones used for actions that are mostly monochromatic are very simple, and that’s part of their appeal.
Since some time, Plasma themes that are SVG files as well have the capability of being colored with system themes.
So, why not doing this for every icon as well?
One problem with monochromatic icons is that they can lose contrast in particular situation: when the application uses another color scheme or in places such as in menu items uder the mouse, that get a blue background, giving a not too visible dark gray on dark blue.
That’s one of those “last mile” polishing issues that may be small, but have quite a big impact on the perceived quality of the finished product.
Starting with Plasma 5.7 Icons will behave the same way as Plasma themes: they can have an internal stylesheet which colors will be replaced at runtime with the colors from the system theme.
Here, Dolphin with the colors theme “Wonton Soup” and all the breeze icons following the text color of the theme:
Some applications, like Gwenview can use a completely custom color scheme, in the case of GwenView, it switches to a dark color scheme when fullscreen, regardless of the normal system color theme:
Icons that are in a “selected” state such as the menu item under the mouse or the current dolphin sidebar item change their color, just like the text does too:
Here with some custom colors for the highlight areas:
How to create a compatible icon?
First of all, Big kudos to Andreas for updating the whole breeze theme to the standard described below 😀
This is a quite minimal SVG file that supports colors from the system theme (Plasma Svg themes follow the same convention):
The colors defined in Text, Background, Highlight etc will be replaced with the corresponding colors from the system theme (look at the Systemsettings module to configure colors to see what colors they actually are)
This also defines a very minimal palette of “semantic” colors: you have the foreground and background colors for purely monochromatic shapes, and other colors for small accents that make the icon slightly more expressive than purely monochromatic such as Highlight, positive, negative (an “x” icon to close will be usually of “negative” color)
The other important part is the actual definition of the shape:
The rectangle has class=”ColorScheme-Text” that will make the stylesheet match to the class definition of ColorScheme-Text, that defines a color.
In order to actually apply that color, you can see the attribute style=”fill:currentColor”. It’s important no other colors are defined in the style attribute.
An informational tooltip in Plasma is an item that shows extra informations for items such as task items, and is a single entity, moving along what you want to know more of, rather than magically appear out of nowhere (that’s the kind of “magic” the human brain doesn’t like).
A problem with Plasma tooltips was that they tried to animate themselves, that is usually not a good idea on X11, due to its old async architecture.
But KWin to the rescue! if we want a smooth animation of both the position and the size of the tooltip, the compositor is the place where to do it.
With its scripting user interface, it was even possible to implement it completely in JavaScript.
You can see it in this video taskbar tooltips animating and resizing/morphing in a similar way Windows 7 does.
Btw, the animations in he video looks way less smooth than are in reality, due how terrible screencasting is under X11, but for that:
The Plasma theme system had a feature (since many years, actually) in which SVG elements done in a certain way can be recolored with colors coming from a theme file.
The Breeze Plasma theme (and now all the monochrome Breeze icons too) was all done in this way, in part to prepare what I’m, presenting today:
If the colors in the SVG can follow a color scheme defined in the theme, they can follow also a system wide color theme no?
For Plasma 5.6, (as a feature that was requested really a lot) the default Breeze theme, while by looking familiar, it will change color following the applications scheme.
However, if you prefer to maintain a clear distinction between the workspace and the applications (And I’m definitely among them), there are still available the themes “Breeze Light” and “Breeze Dark”, just as before (Oxygen and Air also received some nice visual updates).
Let’s look at some screenshot:
So far so normal, typical Breeze theme we had so far.
Quoting from the announcement:
“KDE Neon is the intersection of these needs using a stable Ubuntu long-term release as its core, packaging the hottest software fresh from the KDE Community ovens. Compute knowing you have a solid foundation and enjoy the features you experience in the world’s most customisable desktop.”
This is pretty exciting for anyone who wants a stable core system with a setup of KDE Plasma software on to as recent as possible, setted-up and configured as good as possible, with hopefully less issues like “distro X has a slightly outdated version of kibrary Y which is know that makes app Z crash”.
Hell, I was so excited that during a sleepless night, I has been completely possessed by the Muse and I had to do this artwork based on a riff of its logo:
NEON written as a neon sign, how original :p It’s pretty tacky but it’s intended to be, here for your viewing pleasure at a typical wallpaper resolution.
Plasma 5.1 will make way easier to fine-tune their workspace to their needs.While already very powerful, it was not always trivial, so now on one hand it will be possible choose between plasmoids that offer the same feature with a very simple UI.
On the other hand, ever wanted to set themes, look and feel of your desktop, but was discouraged by how many places you had to change themes to make the experience as you wanted? being icon theme, widget style, plasma theme, cursors etc…
Plasma 5.1 will support the concept of Look and Feel packages (or “mega themes” if you like) Basically an one stop place to set the look and feel of the whole desktop.
To start, there will be a “Breeze” and an “Oxygen” experience, and in the future, let’s hope yours too 😉
In the first release it will be very basic, but in the future it will grow more complete, allowing to more fine-tune individual components, downloading new “look and feels” from the internet etc.
Technically, Look And Feel themes are plasma packages, that contain two things: configuration files for defaults such as icons, colors, cursors etc
and QML files for certain parts of the workspace ui, such as the splashscreen, the lockscreen etc, allowing from very simple things (like a theme that just sets icon theme, widget style etc) to very comprehensive ones, that change completely the logout dialog, lockscreen etc.
