Creating a New Plasma Look and Feel
A user on reddit recently asked how to modify the Breeze Alt+Tab
theme. Unfortunately it seems to be tied to the Look and Feel as of Plasma 5.14.
Introduction to KWin TabBox skins
The tabbox skins for the Alt+Tab
are located at /usr/share/kwin/tabbox/
for the preinstalled skins, and ~/.local/share/kwin/tabbox/
for the downloaded skins. However, you’ll notice that the “Breeze” tabbox skin isn’t there. This is because it’s packaged in the Breeze “Look and Feel”.
/usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/org.kde.breeze.desktop/contents/
I have no idea what the “desktop” switcher is. It’s not the “Desktop Switch On-Screen Display”.
desktopswitcher/DesktopSwitcher.qml
The Alt+Tab
skin is probably the:
windowswitcher/WindowSwitcher.qml
Creating a new Look and Feel
Here’s how create your own look and feel based off Breeze.
Note, X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name
must be the same as the folder name.
Note, you might want to manually remove all the translated Name[sl]=Sapica
in the metadata.desktop
if you’re not using the en_US
locale/translations, as otherwise it’ll use a translated version of “Breeze” in the System Settings instead of what we just set it as (Breeze (SystemdPlusLinux)
).
Editing the Look and Feel
Then play around with the WindowSwitcher.qml
file.
To test your changes, you’ll probably need to run kwin_x11 --replace
to restart KWin. You might be able to get away with switching to another Look and Feel, then back to yours, but I believe it might cache the theme, which is why restarting kwin might be required.
You can also play around with the Volume OSD.
- https://github.com/Zren/plasma-lookandfeel-alphablack/tree/master/contents/osd
- https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/9j57z2/fixing_the_awful_volumebrightness_osd_size/
Look and Feel Explorer
There’s also “Look and Feel Explorer” app in the plasma-sdk
package, but it’s probably better to learn how to edit the raw files since all that app does is “copy a look and feel”, and edit it’s metadata.desktop
file.