 In my last video, somebody asked me, hey, Nicola, how can I try some configuration and then kind of save that configuration and switch to another? And funny enough, I had made a video about that with Plasma config server, which sadly enough does not seem to work currently, at least so a word. Luckily enough, there is another option, which is con save, which is pretty much the first thing I want to talk about, because it's pretty important. So what this script does, simply enough, is to allow you to save all of your .config files, and you can actually set up which .config should be saved and which one shouldn't. It was actually born, if I understood this correctly, as meant to save customizations for KD Plasma, so this use case. So you pretty much only have to go on the terminal and say con save, you know, save this setup, and that's gonna work, and then you can load it back, which is nicely enough. I don't know if it automatically restarts Plasma shell or not, but it's pretty easy to do. Which also answers another question that I've heard, which is, how can I actually test a customization without risking to lose what I had so far? Especially if you try out a different global theme, as an example, everything that you apply cannot be reverted back, so you gotta be a little bit careful. So this is my first big advice, use con save to actually test out things to see if everything works correctly. But now let's actually get into how to customize KD, and some nice projects that I want to highlight in this video. Let's start with wallpaper. Of course, you can just pick any wallpaper that you'd like, but the cool thing is that KD Plasma actually supports different kind of wallpapers, like yes, you can have images, and slideshows as well, and videos, all these things, but there is more, especially if you go into the third parties. You just have to, you know, right click the desktop, go into the wallpaper settings, and then you can change from image to anything, and you can download some new kind of wallpapers. The first one that I would really like to recommend is inactive blur, which basically is just an image or a slideshow, but whenever you open up a window, then the wallpaper is gonna blur. And personally, I just love that, because, you know, the window is in the center, in focus, what's behind it is autofocus, as if I was taking a photograph, my background is autofocus right now. So personally, I just love that. And if it was up to me, it would be the default, but I can understand that some people might not like it. Then we have shaders, which are super fun to play with, if you, I mean, they will kill your battery life, and they will also use all of your CPU. But if you got a cold GPU, and you can afford that, then you can have some crazy animated wallpapers. And there's a ton of them. I can't go through all of them, but some of them look really good. And I mean, some are really creative. So if you like some shiny animated wallpapers that aren't videos, but are actually rendered as you watch them, this is awesome. Another thing I want to mention is that there's a nice plugin that allows you to use as wallpapers images that are taken from a specific subreddit. So you could put like some artistic subreddit as an example and always have some nice art as your wallpaper, or I don't know, earth porn as an example and have some cool stuff. Funny enough, I went into settings to see, you know, how you can customize this. And one of the settings said hide all not-safe for work images. And it's on by default. So I thought, I wonder if it's, I wonder if I can disable that. So I disabled it, and I put some not-safe for work subreddit just for the walls to see what would happen. And what happened is that, yes, I got a very explicit wallpaper, and also the plugin crashed. And I couldn't go into my wallpaper settings anymore. And I was literally stuck with, you know what, this is everything I had to say about wallpapers. Let's switch to plasma themes. So plasma themes, if you don't know, are the things that customize the look of plasma, which is like the panel at the bottom, and then the applets, the dialogues, the tooltips in the sidebar for activities or add new widgets. All these things follow key runners will follow the plasma theme. So the first plasma theme that you have to know about, if you want to customize scale plasma is alpha black, which is not a normal plasma theme. Usually you download a theme and that's how it looks like. Like you've got your theme, but alpha black is actually, but alpha black is actually a theme that you can customize, which is crazy. So basically you just have to add the alpha black widget, which comes with the plasma theme. And then it allows you to change pretty much anything of the plasma theme. I'm not anything, but a lot of things, like the transparency levels of both widgets and the panel, the colors, you know, this kind of things. And it's all exposed in a nice widget. All of these things is something that we cannot offer as part of breeze, like some nice customization that can only come through to third party. So if you want to have a plasma theme that's customizable in itself without having to change plasma theme, go with alpha black recommended. Then I think it's finally time to tell you what my favorite plasma theme is after breeze, obviously, and that is Maya transparent. I just love Maya transparent. It's transparent. It's blurry. And it's transparent. What else do we have to say? It looks beautiful. It just looks beautiful. So I would recommend that we've also got color breeze, which is very bold. Basically, instead of using the normal color for the background, it uses the view background color, which makes everything very colorful. So if you're going for, you know, some shiny things that that is something to consider, you've got you've got also willow light, which I would recommend if you try to replicate a windows look, white, sir, if you want to go for a Macintosh like setup. And then Chrome OS has very big rounded corners, which means that you can edit your panel so that it doesn't fit with. So it's a bit shorter. And then make sure that it's as tall as the border, the border radius, it's gonna look like, you know, Chrome OS. And of course, I mean lots of other plasma themes that you can browse through the store. Let's now switch to application styles. So the first one I would I would like to recommend, of course, putting breeze aside is lightly, which is, I think the best non breeze C plus plus kevantum, which I think is the best non breeze C plus plus application style, because usually what you download if you're using like Vantum and such are SVG styles. This one is actually a fork of breeze, and it's written in C plus plus, which makes it a bit faster and easier on performance. You have to either install it as a package or compile it because obviously it's not SVG is it's not something you can just download it's actual C plus plus code. And it's Wow, it looks very good. In my opinion, it's also very customizable. You can make side brush transparent, they are transparent out of the box. And you can also make the header here at the top also transparent, which also looks pretty good. And then of course, there is kevantum. So how this works, if you don't know that is kevantum is a C plus plus style, but it doesn't actually style anything on its own. What it does, it says, okay, I'm going to take some SVGs. And then I'm going to use those SVGs to draw the style. And then you can download any kind of SVG package to use for kevantum to draw the application a theme style. So you've got to install kevantum, which is the actual application style. You've got to turn on kevantum in settings. And then kevantum comes with its own application to select the SVG theme. And then you can just select any SVG theme that's supported by kevantum. And there are some very nice and good looking ones. And I don't have any particular to recommend, but just go to the store, you can browse them. It's pretty easy to do so. But even if you don't want to go for kevantum, there's a lot that you can customize. There's a lot that you can customize in Breeze itself. As an example, the menus like the context menus are transparent. If you want, you can actually choose by how much they should be transparent. They are going to be blurred behind. And I don't think they support the contrast effect yet, but I'm sure about that. Maybe that changed recently. You can also like center the tab bars. If you prefer them center, that's an option as well. And in general, you can decide whether you want to have, you know, frames and some things like there is some customization in the Breeze application itself, which brings me to a very important point, which is color schemes. And funny enough, you could say like, okay, color schemes are pretty easy. Like, you know, you just select the colors, but actually there's so much more to it. So first of all, this is I think the one of the few things that you can actually, you know, you know, customize yourself directly. You just click on the edit icon and can start selecting colors like it or nothing. So that's already pretty cool. What you would like to do, like if you look at an application, the background color, which is grayish as the window background color, okay, then on top of it, you usually have like these white frames, which are views. So you want to edit the background color for the views section. And then at the top, you've got the header. So you want to edit the header background color for that one. These are the three main things. By the way, it is possible for a color scheme to ask to use like just a normal title bar instead of a header bar. In recent times, Kili Plasma switched by default to a header bar. But if you go back to like Breeze Classic, you will see it as a normal title bar. However, to be fully honest, I don't know how you switch between the two. So I tried to research this, but couldn't find the answer. So there is a way. I just don't know it. Sorry. There is a little trick or hack that I recently mentioned. And that is you can actually edit the color scheme files with Kate by going to the directory. And the cool thing about that is that that allows you to add one more value, which is the transparency value. Now, you should only use this for foreground objects like buttons and such that will make them transparent. But you can also do that for the window background that's gonna make the window transparent as long as you're using a Kuri Gami application. But if you're using like Dolphin, which is Qt Widgets, that's not going to make any transparent. Still, you know, it's up to you. Then you have some nice configuration which are not directly related colors. As an example, you can choose to apply effects to inactive windows, which basically means that if you switch to another window, the previous one, which is now inactive, will change some of its color to tell you that it's in to tell you that it's inactive. As an example, the black will become less black, I think, you know, you can check for yourself. The cool thing in here, obviously, is the accent color, which is usually set by the color scheme, but you can vary very easily override it. You can choose your own accent color, which by the way is going to be used not just throughout the UI, but also for some icons like Dolphin or System Settings. You can actually choose yourself or that is beautiful. You can automatically extract the paper and it works so beautifully. And then you have got a lot of things you can do extra with accent color. First of all, always in the color scheme options, you can make sure that that color is used to tint the windows. So basically, you take the normal colors that a color scheme has, and you just add a little bit of the accent color. And if you do this carefully, it's going to look gorgeous. Another thing you can do is to make the header bar. So at the top, use the accent color instead of the normal header color, which is very bold. In my opinion, often enough, it doesn't quite work aesthetically, but if you manage to get the colors right, beautiful. So that is also something to investigate. And that was everything for color schemes, a lot of stuff. Let's switch to window decorations. Now, obviously, you can select which buttons to put in the title bar. So you've got the normal buttons. You can also add a menu, which is going to look like, you know, a little menu. And then if you click it, you're going to have the options of the application. You know what I mean. You also have a couple of things that are only exposed by default through right click. As an example, if you're not using Wayland, there's a shade, which basically collapses the window to just the title bar if you press that. And there is also keep above, which is super useful, pin to all desktops, which is also super useful. And keep below, which is not as useful, it's a nice feature to have. I don't see the use case, but you have it. If you want a window to always be behind the others, I guess you can do. You might want to use a locally integrated menu, like Unity, that is not provided out of the box, but there are a couple of third party window decorations that offer that, like this one and this one. There is also if you want breeze to have it a merge request, which you should be able to apply on breeze and then rebase it if you want. So that should also work. Sadly enough, it doesn't look like it's going to merge into the code base of KDE itself anytime soon. But you know, you can have it. You just have to install a third party application. I meant creation. And I mean, of course, you've got a lot of third party window decoration that you can choose from, from the store and such. I wouldn't give any particular recommendation. And to be fully honest, I never understood how this part of KDE worked because you've got like QML window decorations. And then you've got SVGs one. And then there's like a Rory and then there's stuff. And I just don't understand how this works. So you do you. I don't know. Let's talk a bit about workspace behavior. And I immediately want to address contrast effect. Now, if you know about contrast effect, and it's not for me, it might be that you think that contrast effect is that annoying effect that gives you visual glitches. That's how I usually see it around on Reddit and such. Of course, there's more to it. The contrast effect basically takes the content behind plasma windows and dialogues. And if they are transparent, otherwise forget about that. But if they are transparent, you can basically edit what's behind a window to change some stuff like the saturation, the lightness, the contrast. And yes, this can and is used for accessibility, as an example. But also if you want to blur to look even better, what you can do is take the wallpaper and apply the contrast effect, which runs up the saturation. And then you blur with saturation, ramp it up. And that's gonna look better because it's more saturated. So that is kind of how it's used in Katie plasma itself. It basically makes the blur look better. And it's for accessibility. If you've got like a dark wallpaper, you don't want something transparent with black text on a black wallpaper. Obviously. So the contrast effect makes the black of the wallpaper less black. So then you also apply the transparency. And it's, it's fine. So the cool thing is that you can customize the contrast effect. You can do so in the plasma theme file. And so it's part of the plasma theme in theory. But you can just, you know, edit a file. It's literally just changing saturation equals something value. And you can, you know, play with it. As an example, you can change. I don't remember which value. I totally don't remember which value. But if you put it to like zero, you're gonna make everything behind. Ah, yes, saturation done by me. If you put saturation to zero, you're going to make everything behind a plasma dialogue, wet and black, which can look very cool if you're doing some very specific transparent setups. So that is also not you can check that out. Still in the desktop effects section, you've got a lot of options to, you know, change some animations like when you open and close windows or dialogues, you can just choose the animation you prefer. And so much more. You can, as an example, put thumbnails aside, which is basically picture in picture for a specific window. You can draw marks on the screen. You can zoom in or use a magnifier that makes everything bigger underneath the mouse. If you've got like bad eyes or something, I'm just kidding. And then there is the overview effect, which by default is banded to the MetaW shortcut. If you don't know about the overview effect or where are you living under a rock, just kidding. But seriously, use the overview because it looks awesome in any configuration. And please give it a better shortcut. Please MetaW. Come on, come on. I would really like that effect to have a significantly better shot. So yeah. Then you're able to customize screen edges, which basically is whenever you move your mouse into edge or a screen corner, something can happen. And maybe something else can happen if you're dragging a window. And you can just, you know, choose what that something is. As an example, I choose that whenever I go to the top part with my mouse, KRunner opens, or I don't know, if I go to the left, it's going to trigger the desktop grid. Or if I go to the right, it's going to trigger the overview, especially because I use a pen. And that just means, you know, putting the pen on the right. So it doesn't happen accidentally. It's, you know, this kind of little things that can help you get started with your workflow and such. Another example, if I record correctly, is that if you drag a window near a screen edge and you keep it there, it's going to switch to the next virtual desktop. So you can just move windows between virtual desktops more easily. That's a nice feature. These kind of things. And then there is window management, which has like so much stuff that I personally don't need. But if you're doing customizations like crazy customizations, then you might want to look into it. First of all, you have the ability which I actually love to make the focused window always the one underneath mouse. Personally, I find that very useful if I use a mouse, but your mileage may vary. You can choose what action to do when you interact with the title bar. As an example, you can make it so that whenever you use the scroll wheel on the title bar, that's going to change the opacity of the window if you like transparency and such. And I know there's a bunch of customization in there. I literally wrote, there is a bunch of customization in my video script. Sorry, but you can choose every aspect of interacting with windows. It's going to be even what happens if you meta click a window or meta right click, this kind of thing. So like, whenever you interact with a window, you can customize what's going to happen. You can also choose snapping, like how much snapping there should be, which you basically, if you drag a window near to another, they're going to snap together. That's a very useful feature. And you can choose how much of that you want. And then you've got the task switcher, which basically lets you customize how, what should happen when you press alt tab. And you can choose, you know, the shortcut, obviously, and also the look. So you've got various presets. You can have like a center bar with icons. You can a sidebar. You can have the flip cover, which is like this, which looks pretty good, in my opinion. There's a lot of things you can choose. And you can also choose which applications should be shown in the task manager and which ones should be left out. And then you have kewin scripts and window rules. In my video script, I literally wrote explain what they are. So basically, a kewin scripts are scripts that use the kewin API to do things with your windows. And it could be a variety of things. But usually it's, as an example, tiling. There's a lot of tiling kewin scripts, Cronkite, Cronkite, I don't know how to pronounce this one. And it's tiling, you know, there's also a bismuth though. Yeah, I don't think that's the end anymore, sadly. So you can have tiling, just use kewin scripts. You can also write your own using the kewin API. And you can just go through the store and see if there's anything useful. By the way, you never have to actually go to the store. There's always that little button that opens the get hot new stuff application. Window rules, which by the way, you can apply just by right clicking the title bar and then saying, okay, add some rules for this window telling kewin that whenever you have a certain window of a certain class of a certain type, then that window should have always a specific window manager property. As an example, it could be transparent, it could have a different color scheme for, you know, the title bar and such, it could be in a different position, it could not be a recessible or make it impossible to close. All these things are available through window rules. Okay, so I've talked for, I have talked for 30 minutes straight. And I haven't even started talking about the main topic, which is widgets. However, if I started that now, this is going to be a video plus one hour, which is too much. So I'm going to call it a day for now. I've talked about the main customization features except widgets, I think the next video I'm going to go dive in into widgets a lot. So if you like this kind of things, actually, if you like this kind of things, where's the button? If you like this kind of things, you can join the patrons, which are currently supporting this whole YouTube project of mine. And my goal for this month is reached by far, which is awesome because I'm buying new lights, new cameras every day lately. But, you know, you can just support me and such that makes me a very happy person and allows me to continue work on upgrading the quality of everything, video editing, video quality, audio, all these things I'm still working on. So thanks everybody for following along and see you tomorrow, not tomorrow, in a couple of days with a new video.