Manage KDE Plasma with Home Manager
This project aims to provide Home Manager modules which allow you
to configure KDE Plasma using Nix.
Table of contents
Supported versions
plasma-manager supports both plasma 5 and plasma 6. The trunk branch is the
most up-to-date branch and is mainly focused on plasma 6, but may still work on
plasma 5. If you are running plasma 5, it’s recommended to use the plasma-5
branch, which is designed to have better compatibility with plasma 5. To do this
with flakes you can use “github:nix-community/plasma-manager/plasma-5” as your
flake url, or if you are using nix-channels you can set the channel url to
“https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager/archive/plasma-5.tar.gz”. It’s
worth noting that the plasma 5 branch, due to the extra work required for
maintaining, may lag behind a bit in features, but in general it should be less
broken when used with plasma 5. If you want the best experience with
plasma-manager it’s recommended running plasma 6.
What’s supported
At the moment plasma-manager supports configuring the following:
- KDE configuration files (via the
files module)
- Global themes, colorschemes, icons, cursortheme, wallpaper (via the
workspace module)
- Desktop icons, widgets, and mouse actions (via the
desktop module)
- Configuration of spectacle shortcuts (via the
spectacle module)
- Shortcuts (via the
shortcuts module)
- Hotkeys (via the
hotkeys module)
- Panels and Extra Widgets (via the
panels module)
- Keyboards, Touchpads and Mice (via the
input module)
- KRunner (via the
krunner module)
- Screen locker (via the
kscreenlocker module)
- Fonts (via the
fonts module)
- Window Rules (via the
window-rules module)
- Session (via the
session module)
- KDE apps (via the
apps module). In particular the following kde apps have
modules in plasma-manager:
- ghostwriter
- kate
- konsole
- okular
Additionally there are more functionality than just listed above, and more
functionality to come in the future!
What’s not well supported (at the moment)
There also are some things which at the moment isn’t very well supported, in
particular:
There may also be more things we aren’t aware of. If you find some other
limitations don’t hesitate to open an issue or submit a pr.
What will not be supported
There are some things which are out of bounds for this project due to technical
reasons. For example
- Plasma Login configuration (requires root-privileges and thus not suited for a
home-manager module)
Getting started
We provide some examples to help you get started. These are located in the
examples directory. Here you in particular can find:
With more to come! These should give you some idea how to get started with
plasma-manager.
Additionally,
the manual section containing all the supported plasma-manager options
may come in handy.
Make your configuration more declarative with overrideConfig
By default plasma-manager will simply write the specified configurations to
various config-files and leave all other options alone. This way settings not
specified in plasma-manager will be left alone, meaning that configurations
made outside plasma-manager will still be set. This can lead to different
settings on different machines even with the same plasma-manager
configuration. If you like a declarative approach better consider enabling
overrideConfig. This makes it so all options not set by plasma-manager will
be set to the default on login. In practice this then becomes a declarative
setup, much like what you would expect from most home-manager options/modules.
One thing to keep in mind is that enabling this option will delete all the KDE
config-files on home-manager activation, and replace them with config-files
generated by plasma-manager. Therefore make sure you backup your KDE
config-files before enabling this option if you don’t want to lose them.
Capturing Your Current Configuration with rc2nix
To make it easier to migrate to plasma-manager, and to help maintain your Nix
configuration when not using overrideConfig, this project includes a tool
called rc2nix.
This tool will read KDE configuration files and translate them to Nix. The
translated configuration is written to standard output. This makes it easy to:
- Generate an initial Plasma Manager configuration file.
- See what settings are changed by a GUI tool by capturing a file
before and after using the tool and then using
diff.
Keep in mind that the rc2nix module isn’t perfect and often will give somewhat
suboptimal configurations (it will in some cases prefer using the files module
when better configurations can be achieved using higher-level modules). However,
it is still a useful tool to quickly get your configuration up and running or
converting config-files generated by the gui settings app to nix expressions.
To run the rc2nix tool without having to clone this repository run
the following shell command:
nix run github:nix-community/plasma-manager
Contributions and Maintenance
This is a community project and we welcome all contributions. KDE plasma and its
apps consists of a lot of configuration options, and if you find that some
options are missing and have the skills to implement this, PRs are very welcome.
Issues are also welcome for everything from feature-requests to bug-reports or
just general suggestions for improving the project.
Special Thanks
plasma-manager started off it’s development under
pjones, whose contributions have laid the
foundation of the project to this day. The project was otherwise inspired by the
suggestions on Home Manager Issue
#607 by people such as bew and
kurnevsky. Thank you.
评论