Plasma Sprint in Barcelona

Sunday afternoon, a few hardboiled hackers are still in the Barcelona office, hacking on things. The past week has been characterized by intense coding, good food, and a lot of fun.

During the first two days  mostly did bugfixing and bug triaging, fixing some pet peeves and improving the overall polish of Plasma. After that I focussed on keyboard navigation, which, due to its origins, is quite painful to get right in QML.

Our beloved Toolbox can now cover other windows and has proper keyboard navigation support
Our beloved Toolbox can now cover other windows and has proper keyboard navigation support
Switching tasks using the mouse wheel is now configurable
Switching tasks using the mouse wheel is now configurable

There’s also a new KWindowSystem QML import in KDeclarative which gives you access to virtual desktop handling, compositing, and more.

The probably most interesting feature David Edmundson and I have been working on was an “Energy information” control module providing detailed information about energy consumption on your device.

Energy Information center
Statistics about energy consumption, work in progress

We want to get KInfoCenter out of this “nerdy corner” by augmenting it with rich and beautiful modules and encourage users to check it out. The energy information module is the first step in that direction, other developers have also expressed their interest for that, for instance, it could show much more detailed information about what Baloo is doing at the moment.

In other news, since my last blog post the following improvements to power management have been made:
– Ported DPMS to XCB
– Screen brightness change is smoothly animated (if supported by driver and hardware combination)
– It won’t suspend during shutdown

Plasma 5.3 is going to rock!

6 thoughts on “Plasma Sprint in Barcelona”

  1. Energy Information is a killer feature. Along the lines of it I would love to see a Data usage tab too (and also metered connection profile support in Network Manager/Moun).

  2. How do you build this new module?? i checked out the energyInfo branch and i try to build with Arch linux i keep receiving this error:

    In file included from /tmp/yaourt-tmp-tajidinabd/aur-kinfocenter-git/src/kinfocenter/Modules/energy/kcm.cpp:20:0:
    /tmp/yaourt-tmp-tajidinabd/aur-kinfocenter-git/src/kinfocenter/Modules/energy/kcm.h:23:23: fatal error: KCModuleQml: No such file or directory
    #include
    ^
    compilation terminated.

    1. You also need the, unfortunately not yet merged, mart/qmlKcms branch of kconfigwidgets

  3. I’m probably in a wrong place but currently I’m trying to find someone responsible for the design(code) of icon task manager. I really miss how previews worked in KDE in icon task manager. They were informative – showed Desktop number the name etc. Now if you have multiple previews of one icon(app) its a mess. It shows previews next to each other without titles or anything. I’m guessing it’s just not finished. I haven’t seen any post about it from devs wanting a design in VDG forum. And it really hard to understand the structure of KDE especially right now with frameworks plasmas etc.

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