Plasma Desktop’s ToolboxOne of the important design cornerstones of Plasma is that we want to reduce the amount of “hidden features” as much as possible. We do not want to have to rely on the user knowing where to right-click in case she wants to find a certain, desktop-related option, say adding widgets, opening the desktop settings dialog, the activity switcher, etc.. For this, Plasma 4.0 introduced the toolbox, a small icon that when clicked opens a small dialog with actions related to the desktop. To many users, this is an important lifeline when they’re looking for a specific option.
In Plasma 4.x, there was a Plasmoid, provided by a third party, that used a pretty gross hack to remove the toolbox (which was depicted as the old Plasma logo, resembling a cashew a bit). We did not support this officially, but if people are deliberately risking to break their desktop, who are we to complain. They get to keep both pieces.
During the migration to QML (which begun during Plasma 4.x times), one of the parts I had been porting to QtQuick was this toolbox. Like so many other components in Plasma, this is actually a small plugin. That means it’s easy to replace the toolbox with something else. This feature has not really been documented as its more or less an internal thing, and we didn’t want to rob users of this important lifeline.
Some users want to reduce clutter on their desktop as much as possible, however. Since the options offered in the toolbox are also accessible elsewhere (if you know to find them). Replacing the toolbox is actually pretty easy. You can put a unicorn dancing on a rainbow around your desktop there, but you can also replace it with just an empty object, which means that you’re effectively hiding the toolbox.
For users who would rather like their toolbox to be gone, I’ve prepared a small package that overrides the installed toolbox with an empty one. Hiding the toolbox is as easy as installing this minimal package, which means the toolbox doesn’t get shown, or even get loaded.
I would not recommend doing this, especially not as default, but at the same time, I don’t want to limit what people do with their Plasma do what we as developers exactly envision, so there you go.
Now restart the Plasma Shell (either by stopping the plasmashell process, or by logging out and in again), and your toolbox should be gone.
If you want it back, run
plasmapkg2 -t package -r org.kde.desktoptoolbox
Then restart Plasma and it’s back again.
Even more than just removing the toolbox, I’d like to invite and encourage everybody to come up with nice, crazy and beautiful ideas how to display and interact with the toolbox. The toolbox being a QtQuick Plasmoid package, it’s easy to change and to share with others.
In Plasma, we have traditionally relied on the font settings dictated by the distribution we run on. This means that we’ll take whatever “Sans” font the distro has set up (or has left to something else), and worked with that. The results of that were sub-optimal at least, as it meant we had almost no control how things are going to look like for end users. Fonts matter a lot, since they determine how readable the UI is, but also what impression it gives. They also have effect on sizing, and even more so in Plasma Next.
Many widgets’ size in a UI depend on the font: Will this message actually fit into the allowed space for it? (And then: What about a translated version of this message?) In Plasma Next, we’re relying even more on sensible font settings and metrics in order to improve our support for HighDPI displays (displays that have more than 150 dots per inch). To achieve balance in the UI sizing, and to make sizing based on what really matters (how much content fits in there?), we’ve put a much stronger emphasis on fontsize-as-rendered-on-a-given screen. I’ve explained the basic mechanics behind that in an earlier post, so I won’t go into too much detail about that. Suffice to say that the base unit for our sizing is the height of the letter M rendered on the screen. This gives us a good base metric that takes into account the DPI of the screen, but also the preference of the font as set up by the user. In essence, this means that we design UIs to fit a certain number of columns and rows of text (approximately, and with ample dynamic spacing, so also longer translations fit well). It also means that the size of UI elements is not expressed in pixels anymore, and also not relative to the screen resolution, but that you get roughly the same physical size on different displays. This seems to work rather well, and we have gotten little complaints about sizing being off.
Relying on font metrics for low-level sizing units also means that we need the font to actually tell us the truth about its sizing. We need to know for example, how many pixels a given font on a given screen with a given pointsize will take, and we need this font to actually align with these values. This sounds quite logical, but there are fonts out there who don’t do a really good job in telling their metrics. This can lead to over- or undersizes UIs, alignment and margins being off, and a whole bunch of other visual and usability problems. It also looks bad. I find it personally quite frustrating when I see UIs that I or somebody else has spent quite some time on “getting it juuuuuust right”, and then seeing it completely misaligned and wrongly sized, just because some distro didn’t pay enough attention to choose a well-working (by our standards, of course ;)) font.
Oxygen Font in Kickoff Launcher rendered at 180DPI
So, to mitigate these cases, we’ve chosen to be a bit more bold about font selection in Plasma Next. We are now including the Oxygen font and setting it up as default on new installs. This means that we know the defaults work, and they work well across a range of displays and systems. We’re also defaulting to certain renderer settings, so the fonts look as smooth as possible on most machines. This fixes a slew of possible technical issues, but it also has a huge impact on esthetics. By setting a default font, we provide a clearer idea of “with this setup, we feel it’s going to look just right”.
For this, we’ve chosen the Oxygen font, which has been created by Vernon Adams, is released under the SIL Open Font License and has been created under the Google webfonts project. It’s a really beautifully done, modern, simple and clean typeface. It is optimized for rendering with Freetype, and it mainly targets web browsers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices. Vern has created this font for Oxygen and in collaboration with some of the Oxygen designers. The font has actually been around for a while already, but we feel it’s now ready for prime-time, so limelight it is.
As it happens with Free software, this has been a long-lasting itch to scratch for me. One of the first thing I had to do with every install of Plasma (or previously, KDE 3 even), was to change the fonts to something bearable. Imagine finishing the installer, and being greeted with Helvetica — Barf. (And Helvetica isn’t even that bad a font, I’ve seen much worse.) I’m glad we could fix this now in Plasma Next, and I’m confident that this will help many users having a nicer looking desktop without changing anything.
Apart from the technicalities, there will always be users who have a strong preference for a certain font, or setting. For those, we have the font selection in our systemsettings, so you can always set up your personally preferred font. We’re just changing the default.
