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:
Item {
id: root
Plasmoid.backgroundHints: PlasmaCore.Types.DefaultBackground
| PlasmaCore.Types.ConfigurableBackground
...
}Or, if you want to default toi the new background-less, automatic shadow:
Item {
id: root
Plasmoid.backgroundHints: PlasmaCore.Types.ShadowBackground
| PlasmaCore.Types.ConfigurableBackground
...
}
Of course the NoBackground option is still there if a shadow isn’t what the graphic style of the plasmoid needs.
A notice that needs to be kept in mind, is that for color inversion to work automatically, one should never do:
color: theme.textColor
But rather
color: PlasmaCore.ColorScope.textColor
Which is a good way to get ready for Qt6 anyways, as context properties are going to be removed in the next Qt major release.
Very nice! Plasma is getting better and better. You got the feeling that the development of plasma and KDE applications has increased enormously in the last two years.
What I already asked myself at KDE 4 times why there is no blur function for semi-transparent plasmoids on the desktop?
I use various plasmoids on the desktop for different activities. And I like to have a semi-transparent background (by choosing a plasma theme) with these plasmoids, so that you can still see something of the background image. The readability of text in the plasmoids on the desktop would be significantly increased by a blur function in the background of the plasmoids. Just as it is already present in the panels and the opened plasmoids in a panel.
> What I already asked myself at KDE 4 times why there is no blur function for semi-transparent plasmoids on the desktop?
That’s partly due to a QtQuick limitation where you can’t apply a shader on the backing store, so you might at most blur the wallpaper, which would look good in the normal case, but when you are dragging it around and go over another plasmoid, you would see that one not blurred, “breaking” the illusion and looking unpolished
Pingback: #kde #Plasma Edit Mode refinements https://notmart.org/blog/2019/11… | Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊)
A question about some difficulty I have with this change: I’ve updated my installation through KCI unstable and got this feature (or something that looks very similar to it) and now all my plasmoids have no background whatsoever. I tried adding `Plasmoid.backgroundHints: PlasmaCore.Types.ShadowBackground | PlasmaCore.Types.ConfigurableBackground` to some plasmoids and it doesn’t seem to do anything – no error but the plasmoid is still completely transparent.
Any suggestions as to what to do?