Task Manager Modified

This is a fork of KDE’s task manager applet with a bunch of dirty hacks to:

• make the indicators in the task bar visually more minimal and look like tabs (no background color, no indicator except for active tab, invert indicator position)
• make it properly centrable (the original has some protruding space causing the visible entries to be shifted off-center)
• strip the labels down to bare file names (remove application names and file endings)
• center the labels in the entry and elide (…) long labels in the middle instead of the end
• add more window controls in the tool tip
• restore the behavior of previous versions where hovering an entry shows a semi-translucent full-screen preview of the window, and remove the small thumbnails
• abuse the “switch to x-th window” function to enable cycling windows in the order in which they appear in the task bar
• and possibly some other small cosmetic changes I forgot to list.

You can diff my fork against the main branch and cherry-pick your own combination with the changes you’d like to have.

Installation

Applet

1. Download: GitHub repo > green top right button Code > Download ZIP > unpack and extract the task-manager-modified folder

2. Install the package: Open a terminal in the task-manager-modified folder and run

   kpackagetool5 -t Plasma/Applet --install package

   (of if you made changes after already having installed it, use the –-upgrade option instead)

3. Restart Plasma:

   plasmashell --replace &&
   

4. Add the modified version to your panel: right-click on panel > Edit panel > Add widgets … > select Task Manager Modified

Style

1. Find your currently used theme (e.g. breeze-light) in either ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/ or /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/ and create a copy in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/
2. Give the theme a new name: as the folder name, in metadata.desktop: Name and in metadata.desktop: X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name
3. Replace widgets/tasks.svgz with the tasks.svgz from this repository
4. Apply the theme via system settings