On a 49 inch ultrawide a notification in the corner means turning your head, so I built a Dynamic Island for Plasma
Hey. I have a 49 inch ultrawide, and on a screen that wide a notification in the bottom right corner genuinely means turning your head to read it. By the time you have looked over, the thing has usually timed out anyway. The top edge in the middle is the one place that is always straight in front of me no matter what I am doing, and it was sitting there empty. So I put something in it.
It is something like "Apple's Dynamic Island", rebuilt for KDE Plasma 6. A pill sits at the top edge, a notification comes in, it stretches into a card, you read it, it shrinks back into the bezel. On an OLED panel the black body is just pixels that are switched off, so it reads as a hole in the screen rather than a box painted on your wallpaper. As a widescreen user this ended up feeling less like a toy and more like something my desk had been missing.
It is not a theme or a tweak. It takes org.freedesktop.Notifications away from plasmashell and draws every card itself on a layer shell surface. That also makes it Wayland only, since there is no layer shell on X11.
Things that ended up in there:
- actions arrive as buttons, and KDE's inline reply gives you a real reply box
- Dolphin file operations with their progress bar and pause and cancel that actually reach the app doing the copying
- volume and brightness, instead of that grey box in the middle of the screen
- now playing with the cover, and the glow takes its colour from the artwork
- RSS feeds, JSON endpoints and a webhook, so anything on your network can put a card up with one curl
- a panel widget that keeps the last hundred, because the pill forgets on purpose
Four palettes, four languages, MIT. There are GIFs of all of it in the readme.
GitHub:
https://github.com/teodorgross/Dynamic-Island-Plasma-Wayland