Howdy everyone. Full-time Linux user since 2020, and got into KDE Plasma since 2024 (before I use GNOME exclusively). Plasma quickly became my favorite desktop environment, but I did notice one point of improvement.
When there are multiple windows, the Icons-only Task Manager widget displays a green plus sign “⊕” on the side nearer to the edge of the screen. For both GNOME and Windows, if there are multiple windows, there is a subtle effect around the icon indicating the presence of multiple windows of that program.
Since there isn’t a way to determine if I have two, or three or more windows for a given icon, it makes it slightly annoying for me to track and switch windows in KDE with the keyboard. I would suggest replacing the “⊕” with matching number of dots, and eventually numbers, and only if there are maybe dozens, then with a “⊕”.
There are some Plasma Styles that do this, so it might not be too hard to take what is used there and perhaps add it to another style. One example I have installed is Unity Ambiance. It has two marks at the bottom of the icon.
Another style (Maia Transparent) adds a number in the green circle at the bottom.
I actually prefer the current oxygen design in this case. This is more because I always have either 1 instance open or 10+ instances open, but at some point the icon looks too clustered when you attempt to show it without numbers.
I guess something like maia transparent could be good, but my issue with maia is that theirs looks like a notification, and that always confused me.
so I prefer to use oxygen in this case since I only want to know if I have more than 1 instance open, and then I can just check all instances to know how many are open
That’s why I use fancy tasks. But if you want some kind of indicator, whether dots or a number, you’ll need a tasks.svgz in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/Theme/widgets/
Fancy tasks:
