User:Hans

Plasma/HOWTO

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Plasma is one of the key technologies of KDE 4 (also known as the "Pillars of KDE"), and one of the most visible to users. As Plasma treats the user interface differently than a traditional desktop, there may be confusion as to what Plasma is, what it does, and how to perform common tasks.

The purpose of this document is to show how to preform common tasks in Plasma. Each HOWTO consists of one topic and a short animation, which is reached by clicking on the link.

The animation is encoded in the GIF format and can thus be viewed in most modern web browsers without any additional plugins installed. Note that the animation is looped.

Note

Almost all HOWTOs assume that the widgets are unlocked. See Unlock widgets for instructions on how to unlock them.

Note

Due to distribution-specific customizations, your desktop might differ from those in the HOWTOs. In particular, if you miss the top-right toolbox (shown as a yellow icon), you can reach most options by right-clicking on the desktop.

HOWTO

Widgets

Desktop

Change wallpaper
Change theme
Change to traditional desktop

Panel

Drag widgets between desktop and panel
Move widgets in panel
Change panel height
Change panel width
Move panel
Change panel alignment
Make panel autohide
Add new panel
Remove panel

Extenders

Drag extender to desktop
Restore extender
Stack extenders

Activities

Create new activity
Switch activities
Rename activity
Delete activity

Further information

For reuse

To link to an animation from another UserBase article, a thumbnail can be posted. Here's an example (edit this page to see the syntax):

How to unlock your widgets

The animations can also be used outside of UserBase. The BBCode (used in most forums) to post a linked thumbnail is: [url=GIF][img]http://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/e/e8/Plasma_howto-thumbnail.png[/img][/url]

Replace GIF with the URL to the GIF file. The corresponding HTML code is: <a href="GIF"><img src="http://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/e/e8/Plasma_howto-thumbnail.png" /></a>

Thanks

Anne Wilson - thanks for all the help with UserBase!

Contributors

Hans Chen - current maintainer