KDE How to change a widget

English Applications
1

I’m trying out Latte-dock for KDE. So far, I’m quite happy with it…but… I want to add a “shutdown” widgit to the latte dock so I can easily shutdown when I need to. Easy-peasy, I know…from the hamburger menu, I selected “Add widget”, scrolled the list and found a widget that does what I want (and more, but never mind that right now). The button for this widget is a picture of the shutdown symbol (circle with a vertical line going from the top edge of the circle down to half way to the center of the circle). The circle and the line are both deep grey color, and the background of the picture is transparent. My desktop background is a picture of Saturn and the the area under latte-dock is nearly totally black. This combination of a transparent icon with dark grey picture and a black background creates the problem that the icon is nearly invisible. I do not want to change the desktop background, Is there a way that tI can edit this icon so that it is visible in the dock? (making the color of the circle and line lighter would be an easy solution)

Thanks if you can help,

Mark

2

Assuming you’re referring to the Lock/Logout Plasmoid…

The Icons used are specified in:

“/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.lock_logout/contents/code/data.js”


var data = {
    icon: "system-lock-screen",
    operation: "lockScreen",
    tooltip_mainText: i18n("Lock"),
    tooltip_subText: i18n("Lock the screen"),
    requires: "LockScreen"
}, {
    icon: "system-switch-user",
    operation: "switchUser",
    tooltip_mainText: i18n("Switch user"),
    tooltip_subText: i18n("Start a parallel session as a different user")
}, {
    icon: "system-shutdown",
    operation: "requestShutDown",
    tooltip_mainText: i18n("Leave..."),
    tooltip_subText: i18n("Logout, turn off or restart the computer")
}, {
    icon: "system-suspend",
    operation: "suspendToRam",
    tooltip_mainText: i18n("Suspend"),
    tooltip_subText: i18n("Sleep (suspend to RAM)"),
    requires: "Suspend"
}, {
    icon: "system-suspend-hibernate",
    operation: "suspendToDisk",
    tooltip_mainText: i18n("Hibernate"),
    tooltip_subText: i18n("Hibernate (suspend to disk)"),
    requires: "Hibernate"
}]

You could either edit the existing icon(s), or create your own icon(s) and change the pointer in that file, (although your changes may get overwritten on updates)…

Icons are located at:

“/usr/share/icons/<theme_name>/actions/<size>/<icon_name>” (You may have to alter several sizes, sorry, I don’t know which size the widget uses.)

“Breeze” icons are svg, so you would need a vector graphic editor such as inkscape…

Personally, I’d change the wallpaper :slight_smile: (Yes, I did note you don’t want to do that).

3

<sigh> I see what you mean. Looks like a new background is in order.

Thank you,

Mark

4

If you have kde5 then I’m pretty sure you can pick whichever icon you want by right-clicking the widget and choosing properties.

5

No, you can’t on the latte dock through its config UI. Also not with widgets unlocked.

6

Just a thought…

You could try local editing of the background image, using GIMP for example to:

Make a circular/elliptical selection of the area of background over which the icon will be
Apply a “large” (say 50-100px) degree of feathering to the selection
Then adjust brightness/contrast of the selected area

With the aim to make the icon more readable, but with the edit not distracting from the background so as to be too obvious.

You may need several attempts before you achieve something which is acceptable…

Best to make a copy of the background image first, and work on that.