mjhjmtu

For the last year, I have been a happy user of KDE Plasma 5. KDE widgets, however, make me miss more directly programmable systems such as conky. Setting up an ad-hoc monitor for anything that needs monitoring at a given moment is not an easy task with KDE Plasma 5, whereas it is a matter of throwing together a shell script and adding a line to ~/.conkyrc.

I understand that to expect conky's extensibility of KDE Plasma 5 would be to misunderstand the project's priorities. Nevertheless, KDE Plasma 4 appears to have JavaScript bindings, which would be much more suitable for ad-hoc desktop scripting compared to the primary Qt C++ API. The kdeexamples Git repository even contains a number of example plasmoids written in JavaScript. However, when I download the Git repository and install an arbitrary example widget:

$ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdeexamples.git
$ kdeexamples/plasma/javascript/plasmoids
$ (cd mediaplayer/; zip ../mediaplayer *)
$ plasmapkg -i mediaplayer.zip 
Successfully installed /home/witiko/kdeexamples/plasma/javascript/plasmoids/mediaplayer.zip

the widget never appears in the „Add Widget“ menu regardless of whether or not I restart Plasma:

$ killall plasmashell; kstart plasmashell

I am guessing that either things changed between KDE Plasma 4 and 5, or that I am doing something wrong. I will be grateful for pointers in the right direction.

kpackagetool5 -i this.plasmoid

is enough to get a proper plasmoid available to place, say on desktop.

try it with a known working one such as the steam punk clock: https://store.kde.org/p/1002162