Bug 423271

Summary:	Consolidate "configuration" options in digital clock
Product:	[Plasma] plasmashell	Reporter:	Andrew Brouwers <abrouwers>
Component:	Digital Clock widget	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	kde, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version:	5.19.1
Target Milestone:	1.0
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Patch to do it

Description Andrew Brouwers 2020-06-20 13:32:19 UTC

SUMMARY:

As a possible UI simplification, I wanted to change the format of the digital clock (to 24hr).  To my surprise, right clicking produced three extremely similar options:

* Adjust date and time
* Set time format
* Configure digital clock

It took me three tries to actually find the correct location.  Perhaps these three should be consolidated in to a single "configure clock" option?  I can see the first two being simple buttons within the menu of the third.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Right click on digital clock

Comment 1 Nate Graham 2020-06-22 16:32:45 UTC

Seriously, yeah. This has confused my for years.

We have the technology, we should do it!

Comment 2 Nate Graham 2020-06-22 17:49:57 UTC

Working on this.

Comment 3 Nate Graham 2020-06-22 17:57:24 UTC

I discovered that this sort of thing is explicitly supported; you just need to add "X-Plasma-ConfigPlugins=kcm_clock, kcm_formats" to the metadata file and remove some code from the applet itself!

However this is currently blocked by the fact that this mechanism can only load QML KCMs, and the Clock and Formats KCMs are written in QWidgets. There is pending work to port them to QML (https://phabricator.kde.org/D24374 and https://phabricator.kde.org/D25449), so once that's done, this should be unblocked!

Comment 4 Nate Graham 2020-06-22 18:35:03 UTC

Created attachment 129594 [details]
Patch to do it

(Putting the patch here for now so I don't forget how do to it once those two KCMs are ported)

Comment 5 David Edmundson 2020-06-22 19:49:15 UTC

@nate Didn't we have a big discussion where you campaigned heavily for not having applets do this and have a settings module loaded with two different entry points without things opening in the single view of systemsettings?

Comment 6 Nate Graham 2020-06-22 20:43:04 UTC

That was a separate discussion, which was eventually resolved in favor of having individual KCMs always open in System Settings whenever they would otherwise be opened in kcmshell.

The issue described here is different; it's more about the number of "configure this thing" menu items in the applet's context menu, rather than the particular shell that opens the config windows.

Essentially what's being requested is to consolidate the multiple configuration-related menu items into just one, which opens a window with all the pages and KCMs combined together. Plasma-pa already does this, displaying both its own settings and also the pulseaudio kcm in a combined window. IMO it's nicer than what the clock applet does, hence the bug report.