Spinning Ball / Circle Launch & Feedback Effect

Broly1 · October 18, 2026, 7:45am

Hey guys! I think it would be nice to have a new spinning ball or circle effect for launch feedback in Plasma, similar to other environments.

I’m testing it right now it seems to work fine and doesn’t look too hard to implement.
What do you all think?

github.com/Broly1/kwin

startupfeedback: Add a spinning busy cursor feedback

committed 12:22AM - 18 Oct 26 UTC

Broly1

+82 -5

Add a "Spinning" pointer feedback style, enabled with Spinning=true in the BusyC…ursorSettings group of klaunchrc. Instead of drawing the application icon next to the pointer, it temporarily replaces the pointer with the cursor theme's animated "progress" cursor, like GNOME and Cinnamon do. Like the other styles, it stops when something else hides the pointer (e.g. the shake cursor effect), so two pointers are never shown at once. To tell those hides apart from its own, Cursors now exposes cursorHideCount(). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

ngraham · October 18, 2026, 7:02pm

you’re in luck; it’s already in progress: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/9959/

Broly1 · October 18, 2026, 7:40pm

Oh awesome! Thank you.