What does the apply button do?

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1

I want to know what commands the Apply button executes for me. I am trying to write a BASH script where I change virtual keyboards just like in the UI but using the command line. The System Settings UI changes the “InputMethod[$e]” parameter of kwinrc, and executes some sort of reload command which I do not know. Can someone help me out?

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2

I’m sure you’ve already tried the “reconfigure” command and found that it didn’t do the job, right?

gdbus call --session --dest org.kde.KWin --object-path /KWin --method org.kde.KWin.reconfigure

Usually people provide this as a qdbus command, but qdbus has at least four different names that I’ve seen in the wild, so the version below may or may not work without tweaking. Either way it’s exactly the same D-Bus method call as in the gdbus command above.

qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

These commands have failed for me when scripting changes to some task switcher shortcuts. The reconfigure command doesn’t seem to do entirely the same thing as what the “Apply” button does in System Settings, unfortunately.

I also am looking for an answer to this question, and I’ve seen at least one other post on Reddit asking for the same thing.

3

Yep, tried reconfigure, reloadConfig, a whole bunch of dbus commands. None of them seemed to do the trick. Replace works, but it restarts all the programs which is not good

4

I also tried using dbus-monitor, but I do not really understand the output, and I think all of the method calls were Properties.Get.
There were also a few signals:
signal time=1732062169.557270 sender=:1.32 → destination=(null destination) serial=3904 path=/org/freedesktop/portal/desktop; interface=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Settings; member=SettingChanged
string “org.kde.VirtualKeyboard”
string “activeClientSupportsTextInput”
variant boolean true
signal time=1732062169.557378 sender=:1.32 → destination=(null destination) serial=3905 path=/org/freedesktop/portal/desktop; interface=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Background; member=RunningApplicationsChanged

5

I can send a full output of the dbus-monitor if needed