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

• What's supported
• What's not supported
• What will not be supported
• Getting started
• Enabling declarative configuration
• Capturing existing configuration
• Contributions and maintenance
• Special thanks

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:pjones/plasma-manager/plasma-5" as you flake url, or if you are using nix-channels you can set the channel url to "https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager/archive/plasma-5.tar.gz".

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)
• Configuration of spectacle shortcuts (via the spectacle module)
• Shortcuts (via the shortcuts module)
• Hotkeys (via the hotkeys module)
• Panels (via the panels module)
• Screen locker (via the kscreenlocker module)
• Fonts (via the fonts module)
• Window Rules (via the window-rules module)
• KDE apps (via the apps module). In particular the following kde apps have modules in plasma-manager:
  • kate
  • konsole

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:

• Real-time updates of configuration without having to log out and back in
• Configuration of LibInput devices (see nix-community#47 and nix-community#123)
• Usage of high-level modules in the configuration generated by rc2nix
• Configuration of kwin window rules
• Keybindings to some key combinations (Ctrl+Alt+T and Print for example, see nix-community#109 and nix-community#136)

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

• SDDM 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:

• An example home-manager configuration with instructions
• An example flake.nix for usage with home-manager only
• An example flake.nix for usage with the system configuration
• An example home.nix showing some of the capabilities of plasma-manager

With more to come! These should give you some idea how to get started with plasma-manager.

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:pjones/plasma-manager

Contributions and Maintenance

This is a community project and we welcome all contributions.

Special Thanks

This work was inspired by the suggestions on Home Manager Issue #607 by people such as bew and kurnevsky. Thank you.