Plasmashell 6.2.1: How to move Widgets on the Panel in Edit Mode?

I can enter edit mode, but then there is no way to move the widgets on the panel to the right or left of their original position. If I left-click or long-leftclick or middle-click or hover - nothing works, I am not getting handles on the icons like it used to be with earlier Plasma versions.

So, is this a bug in Plasma or have I missed some UI function? Or has dragging the icons around on the panel been deemed as unimportant and removed?

Hi,

Enter in edit mode and left click on the panel, after that you can move your plasmoids in panel.

Well, I have tried that a million times, but it doesn’t work. If click and drag an icon, it doesn’t move. If I hover over the icon, nothing happens.

Go directly into edit mode with a right click on the panel.
By hovering over the plasmoid you should see the directional arrow cursor


As stated above, nothing happens when I hover. There are no directional arrows.

But since it seems to work for you, then clearly something is wrong with my KDE installation. I just wanted to know whether I missed something obvious, but apparently not. I may need to reinstall.

1 Like

Right click on the panel, then click on Show Panel Configuration, then you’ll be able to move or delete a widget.

I’m not sure the instructions are so clear - shame you didn’t offer a screenshot.
Try one more time:

  1. Right click Desktop>press M (for edit Mode).
  2. Move the mouse down to the panel and Left Click (normal click) to show the config window.
  3. Hover with the cursor to see if you get the ‘4 arrow’ move icon:
  4. If you do, then left click and drag it.

Troubleshooting

First step may be to create a USER to try a fresh desktop on your existing installation.

If that doesn’t fix it, then your installation is broken. If that fixes it then you can consider resetting some configs - and as we’re ‘general debug’ mode here we can do a drastic non-destructive reset:

If that fixes it, you know that it’s your $USER data that’s messing it up - so go debug that.

I generally start that by logging in, then moving .config to .config-main and then log out again. It’s drastic

Next time you log in you get a fairly vanilla desktop, and can open Dolphin dual pane with .config | .config-main panels open, move back from ‘main’ anything you think will NOT recreate the problem…

Eventually you should isolate the culprit without reinstalling.

Rename ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

Open Dolphin with Meta+E, then press Ctrl+L to get the addressbar and type ~/.config/ and hit Enter.

Then press / and type ‘applet’ and you should see it highlighted - press F2 and rename it (add DUFF to the end).

Now restart Plasma with systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

I actually created a command for this so I can type ‘prestart’ in krunner…

prestart
#!/bin/bash
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

Now you should have a Vanilla panel, and should find that you can move the plasmoids.

You can use software like ‘meld’ to inspect the difference between the new file and your ‘DUFF’ version.

Rename the new version (add -NEW) and the old version (remove -DUFF) and do ‘prestart’ again to get the old config back.

My screenshot looks like yours minus the crossbars around the icon. They just don’t appear or rather didn’t appear. I now restarted the plasmashell with kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell (I believe this should be equivalent to your command - no?) and then everything suddenly worked.

Turns out that upon booting my machine the plasmashell doesn’t start completely. I noticed that my desktop also remains black, although I did configure a custom background wallpaper. Restarting the plasmashell after booting will make the wallpaper appear and also moving the icons on the panel then works.

So I suppose I should debug what goes wrong during the initial start of plasma. Is there a way to do that? I searched /var/log/messages and found this:

Starting X11 session: "/usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp -background none -seat seat0 -noreset -keeptty -novtswitch -verbose 3" "/etc/X11/xinit/Xsession \"/usr/bin/startplasma-x11\""
[...]
Oct 29 21:21:05 N203 systemd[2287]: Starting plasma-plasmashell.service - KDE Plasma Workspace...
[...]
Oct 29 21:21:06 N203 systemd[2287]: Started plasma-plasmashell.service - KDE Plasma Workspace.
Oct 29 21:21:06 N203 systemd[2287]: Reached target plasma-core.target - KDE Plasma Workspace Core.
[...]
Oct 29 21:21:06 N203 plasmashell[2932]: file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.desktopcontainment/contents/ui/main.qml:178:25: QML FolderViewDropArea (parent or ancestor of QQuickLayoutAttached): Binding loop detected for property "minimumWidth"
Oct 29 21:21:06 N203 org_kde_powerdevil[3019]: Failed to create wl_display (No such file or directory)
[...]
Oct 29 21:21:07 N203 plasmashell[2932]: Toolbox not loading, toolbox package is either invalid or disabled.
[...]
Oct 29 21:22:18 N203 plasmashell[2932]: file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.notifications/contents/ui/global/Globals.qml:136: TypeError: Cannot read property 'screenGeometry' of null
Oct 29 21:22:18 N203 plasmashell[2932]: file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.notifications/contents/ui/global/Globals.qml:250: TypeError: Cannot read property 'plasmoid' of undefined
[...]