What's the best practice to launch a desktop entry in plasmoid?

Development
1

Yesterday I tried Plasma 6.5 Beta on my laptop. Everything works fine except one applet: USwitch - KDE Store . It reports

module "org.kde.plasma.private.quicklaunch" is not installed

Said module was imported in this file: package/contents/ui/main.qml · fdb573e4c03d73023f3555968a186c15d4233e8b · Jakub Lipiński / uswitch · GitLab

Turns out that the applet uses “Logic” from quicklaunch applet to launch desktop entry

    Logic {
        id: kRun
        
        function launch(desktopFile) {
            openUrl('file:' + desktopFile)
        }
    }

After digging through the repositories, I found that the quicklaunch applet was ported to plasma_add_applet macro, and no longer provides a “private” qml library for others to import

Then I’m curious to find out how do other plasmoids launch desktop entries, so I searched “launcher” on store.kde.org, but all I could find is

import org.kde.plasma.private.quicklaunch

(which is not available anymore in plasma 6.5), or

import org.kde.plasma.private.kicker

(which seems too complicated for what I need)

I also tried to search for “run command in plasmoid”, hope to workaround this by just

kde-open /path/to/entry.desktop

but got this answer:

you can’t do this straight out of qtquick/qml …

Looking into Plasma’s QML API docs, there’re just UI components, nothing about launching desktop entry or running command …

So I wonder what’s the best practice to launch a desktop entry in plasmoid? Do you really have to write a C++ module only to do this job?

I know some C++, but plasmoid with C++ modules can’t be installed from KNewStuff “Get New” dialog, and needs to be re-compiled every time plasma updates, which makes it not so convenient for users. I would like to avoid C++ modules in plasmoids if possible.

2

Looking at the MR, looks like quicklaunch is still exposed but in org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch instead.

3

Actually no, there is only /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/plasma/applets/org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch.so , which packs all the qml and the previous “private” library. If I try

import org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch

in my plasmoid, it would complaint that the module “is not installed”. Also it’s not inside /usr/lib/qt6/qml/ directory, which probably means that it was not intended to be imported by others…

4

You are right. Looks like it’s not org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch, it’s still present as org.kde.plasma.private.quicklaunch. I guess I was missing something about how it’s set up with plasma_add_applet.

The reason there’s only an .so file I believe is because porting to the new declarative registration also brings the benefit that the QML files are compiled to C++, so the end result is just a library. So that part is fine.

I built a clean session with kde-builder and I can call the relevant code just fine from an app built with it, though. The module comes from kdeplasma-addons, but just to be sure you do have it installed in your beta system?

5

I’m on Arch Linux and have the packages from kde-unstable repository installed, including kdeplasma-addons. The quicklaunch itself works fine, but errors out when I’m trying to import quicklaunch’s “private” library from other plasmoids

6

This seems to be the key part, since the widget is now only a single file it no longer installs the plugin separately?

6.4

/usr/lib/qt6/qml/org/kde/plasma/private/quicklaunch/kde-qmlmodule.version
/usr/lib/qt6/qml/org/kde/plasma/private/quicklaunch/libquicklaunchplugin.so
/usr/lib/qt6/qml/org/kde/plasma/private/quicklaunch/qmldir
/usr/lib/qt6/qml/org/kde/plasma/private/quicklaunch/quicklaunchplugin.qmltypes

6.5

/usr/lib/qt6/plugins/plasma/applets/org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch.so

Also if the Quicklaunch widget is added to the panel/desktop the third party widgets that depend on it start working again, probably because the libquicklaunchplugin becomes known to Plasma?

7

How did you make third party widgets work again? In my case, the “uswitch” plasmoid still won’t load even if I add Quicklaunch to the panel and restart plasmashell.

8

Need to change the import statement to the new namespace too

import plasma.applet.org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch

Just a workaround, I think the best option here would be to make quicklaunch plugin a separate thing, should I file a bug report about this?

For now I think I’ll copy the plugin to my repo and import it at runtime if the user builds it from source.

Edit: this is the widget where I was also using the quicklaunchplugin https://github.com/luisbocanegra/plasma-panel-spacer-extended

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