kargos

A Plasma port of Argos and BitBar plugins to fast create custom plasmoids.

Note: This is an alpha project. By now, it only was tested on Kubuntu 16.04 LTS.

What is implemented

• Submenus nesting ('--').
• "href" attribute.
• "bash" attribute.
• "size" attribute.
• "refresh" attribute.
• "iconName" attribute (it should be a valid KDE icon name)
• "font" attribute.
• "color" attribute.
• "dropdown" attribute.
• "image" attribute (base64 encoded image).
• "imageURL" attribute (non BitBar, kargos only). A URL for the image.
• "imageWidth", "imageHeight" attributes (non BitBar, kargos only). Max size for the image. If only one is provided, aspect ratio is preserved.
• "terminal" attribute.
• "onclick" attribute (non BitBar, kargos only). Possible values: bash or href. What to execute if you click on the line, that is, to run the command indicated in the bash attribute or go to the web indicated by the href attribute. The corresponding "Go" or "Run" button will not appear.
• HTML support. Only the subset supported by QML.
• Interval detection on the command filename. A custom interval option is available.

Extras / Extensions

We've added a few extensions to the BitBar/Argos protocol, for extra features the authors wanted. All of these are prefixed with kargos..

Icons from Font Awesome

When writing quick bash scripts for personal use, coming up with icons that look decent on various screen sizes/densities is a pain. Using plasma's icons look beautiful, but they are a rather limited selection.

Font Awesome on the other hand, have a vast library of icons that are, well... awesome!
You can use them with the kargos.fa_icon attribute, like so:

#!/bin/bash

# Note: font awesome icon size is determined by font size
echo "Hello world! | kargos.fa_icon=globe size=16";

This would cause Kargos to render:

Note that this uses font awesome version 4.7, so make sure you filter by that version if you use their gallery. Furthermore, some of their icons are not free and can't be used in Kargos. Refer to the plasmoid/contents/vendor/FontAwesome/FontAwesome.qml file for an authoritative list of icons that can be used in Kargos.

Installation

To get and install the latest version:

git clone [email protected]:lipido/kargos.git
cd kargos
kpackagetool5 -t Plasma/Applet --install plasmoid

Also, you can find a release of kargos in kde-look.org, so you can install it directly from your desktop by choosing "Get new widgets"

If you're using Arch Linux, there's also an AUR pacakge for it.

Example plugin

kargos follows (part of) the BitBar plugin standard, which is very simple. To create a plugin, all you have to do is to create an executable program (in any language) that produces standard output following an specific format.

For example, this is the examples/kargos_plugin.1s.sh file (1s means that the plasmoid will re-render every 1 second):

#!/bin/bash
echo "$(date)"
echo "---"
echo "Launch Gimp | bash=/usr/bin/gimp iconName=applications-graphics"
echo "Kernel: $(uname -r) | iconName=system-settings iconName=applications-development"
echo "Go to <i>Google</i> | href=http://www.google.com size=4 iconName=applications-internet" 
TOP_OUTPUT=$(top -b -n 1 | head -n 20 | awk 1 ORS="\\\\n")
echo "$TOP_OUTPUT | font=monospace iconName=applications-system"

You need to configure this file in your plasmoid options:

And then it will produce the following contents in your plasmoid:

That's all. You can add the a kargo plasmoid to your panel. You have to configure it to indicate the command or executable.

Another example: a RSS reader

This a tribute to the KDE 3 KNewsTicker. There are many RSS readers, but the concept of KNewsTicker was unique for me. I do not like to open a RSS client or take any action to read feeds because, although I can do this the first days, in a few days I am not checking them anymore. However, with KNewsTicker, news are rotating continuously and in a discrete fashion. However, you will be aware of them sooner or later.

KNewsTicker was discontinued and no longer available since KDE 4. But you can implement it easily with kargos and Python!

You can find an example of plugin to read your favourite RSS feeds. News will be rotating in your panel and, if you dropdown, you can read all the news.

Here are the results!

Discussion / Contributing

Have questions, ideas, or just wanna talk about Kargos? Come join us at #kargos:kde.org.

Note that this is a matrix channel, not IRC. Matrix is (in many ways) the successor to IRC and KDE is already using it. The KDE wiki has a nice guide for getting started if you've never used matrix client before.