Panel Colorizer for Plasma 6

Made this small but fully configurable plasmoid whose sole purpose is to inject/manage the background of other widgets in the same panel, the goal was to replicate the famous WM status bar look without actually making other widgets or modifying the panel itself.

I think the result looks interesting for something that I figured out was possible just a couple days ago.

This is the first release so it may have some unexpected bugs :upside_down_face:

You can see it in action here

7 Likes

Hi, thanks for your post and the info.

@Konqi
KDE Dev, can the color of the taskbar be changed with KDE 6 ?

This is just a plasmoid I made for myself that does this (not something you will find in plasma 6 as a official feature, just to be clear). The only reason is plasma 6 only is because it’s what I use now but it should work there too if ported to 5.

I am not a KDE developer btw.

1 Like

Oh, sorry I got confused, for changing just the panel background (I think is what you mean by taskbar?) you just replace/modify the panel-background.svg inside the desktop theme (I think there are different variants of fit for opaque and translucent and maybe some other), no other plugins like this one are needed for that.

This looks great, thanks!!

Thanks. And is getting better! Next version will have foreground color customization so bright background colors will now be possible like this:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t recolor icons that aren’t “symbolic” or are rendered in weird ways but I tried to catch the most common cases :slight_smile:

Among some other features that are listed in the readme.

v0.3.0 has been released with tons of changes

Unfortunately Plasma 5 version has been dropped, mainly due to limitations porting foreground colorization

New features

  • Foreground (text & icons) customization

  • Apply fg color to Window Buttons widget

  • option to use a fixed custom panel side padding

  • Custom panel background color

  • Control real panel background opacity

  • Option to fully remove panel background

  • Add outline and shadow control

  • Force Kirigami.Icon color to specific plasmoids using isMask

Bug fixes

  • Listen for widgets added/removed from the panel

  • Don’t change fg color in tray expanded representation

  • Reduce CPU usage only changing fg color for PlasmoidItem children

  • Fix notification applet appearing artifact

  • Don’t change opacity when disabled

  • Continue after error caused by panel being edited

Other

  • Split configuration sections into tabs

  • Use color picker for color fields

  • Add mouse wheel area to floating text fields

3 Likes

v0.4.0 Preset management & auto-loading

New features

  • Margins control to unify heights & extra margins for widgets
  • Contrast correction for all color modes
  • New widget background line mode
  • Include tray widgets in force icon color
  • Preset management (presets can be loaded by any panel!)
  • Support for app tray icon colorization (e.g. OBS icon can be tinted now when previously wasn’t)
  • Preset auto-loading on floating panel / Maximized window
  • System color option for custom color modes (accent, text, background colors)
  • Spacing control
  • Widget background margin (now widgets can be fixed to look right on rounded widget background)

Bug fixes

  • Allow blacklisting the System Tray widget
  • Fix unreadable BadgeOverlay (e.g. battery widget percentage)
  • Fix colors not updating for window buttons widget (my precious!)
  • Fix color animation not working sometimes
  • Don’t rotate colors in static mode with this change you can set a list of colors that matches the amount of widgets and they will always be the same)

Other

  • Only reload window buttons widget when foreground colors change
  • Use list of current widgets for blacklist/force/margins (no more copy pasting plasmoid Ids!)
  • Show last preset loaded

6 Likes

v0.5.0 Text/icons shadow Released!

New features

Bug fixes

  • Fixed contrast correction for some color modes
  • Fixed original panel opacity requiring custom background to work
  • Don’t remove widget rules when they are not in the panel being configured

Other

If you like the project you can support the development :heart:

7 Likes

v0.5.1 Bugfix release

Bug fixes

  • Added button to restore default block/margin/force recolor rules to fix rules not being deleted even after removing the matched widgets.
    image

    Only required if you updated or have presets from version 0.4.0 or older

    Instructions to fix previous presets are provided here

  • Fixed missing color options for panel background

Other

  • Added click support to increase/decrease value in floating text fields
    318698055-e3b842a5-f985-42ea-8749-c6aa78f95c63

Support the development

If you like the project you can:

"Buy Me A Coffee" Liberapay

5 Likes

v0.5.2 Bugfix Release (mostly)

This release is mostly a preparation before a much needed cleanup. After that is done I will include more cool stuff :sunglasses:

Bug fixes

  • Fix transparent outline ugliness by drawing it inside background area
  • Restore now removes all customization
  • Fix panel background color set not saving
  • Fix broken system colors when switching color schemes
  • Fix blacklisted color
  • Fix default appearance restore
  • Ignore global enable from presets
  • Fix restoring hidden panel after global disable
  • Fix blacklisted color
  • Remove outline if background is disabled
  • Disable/hide controls based on category/global disabled status
  • Disable blacklist on global disable
  • Fix per widget margins layout & visibility

Improvements

  • Improve preset auto-loading - Allow loading a preset when a window is touching the panel
  • Split margin from background and move to separate Layout tab
  • Don’t apply any customization by default

Other

  • Switch to RGBA for background opacity

2 Likes

Thx for that, I don’t use Discover so it’s always great having that there.

Congratulations, your widget is a must have to customize the taskbar and so on !

I voted for your widget on the aur.

I did some tests, plasma 6.0.4 wayland, see below :-)

Oh I forgot to push the update to the AUR :man_facepalming: updated it just now. Thank you both for the reminder!

2 Likes

v1.0.0 Rewrite and cool new features

After some months not wanting to touch the monstrosity that v0.5.x became, I decided to rewrite most of the widget, took me a month and some things still need to be worked on, but it’s in a (hopefully) more stable state now.

Release highlights

  • Revamped preset management, built-in presets, preset preview (spectacle needs to be installed for preview creation)
  • Faster initialization and more reliable
  • Survives and doesn’t break with Edit Mode (dragging, adding, removing widgets)
  • Configuration overrides, apply a different configuration for one or multiple widgets, either for the preset or personal
  • Blur behind custom backgrounds, requires building and installing the C++ plugin
  • Background shape for widgets inside System Tray
  • Unified background areas
  • New method to force colorization using color effect
  • Same color options for everything
  • New widget icon
  • Updated settings UI/UX and tab icons

BREAKING CHANGES

Preset configuration format and location has changed see Updated to v1.0.0, where are my presets?

Full changelog

Support the development

2 Likes