Preamble: I have no intention to start a dispute related to the new applet browser in Plasma. Some people like it, some don’t, some prefer the old one, some want something completely different…

As you don’t already know , Marco did some great work which I’m not gonna talk about – he said he’ll make a screencast of it eventually. So I’ll just mention a side-effect of that made possible by a 1-minute patch by yours truly.

KRunner (and Lancelot, naturally) as widget explorers

From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot, search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.

Well, that’s all

Edit: You can also create a shortcut like Meta+P to open krunner with only this /plasma/ runner enabled via Global Shortcuts (thanks vilder for info)

The Plasma Applet Browser is now integrated into the libplasma and it will be available in the next Beta that is going to be published on Wednesday.

I’ve replaced the old drag-and-drop with a bit fancier stuff – now (as you can see in the screenshot) when you drag the plasmoids, you will be shown only the icons (possibly will be replaced by screenshots of plasmoids) not the whole “blue bars” you saw last time.

At the moment, you can add only one applet at a time by dragging, but that will be changed soon. If you use Oxygen style, you’ll encounter a nasty bug concerning the drag-and-drop-icons – there will be no icons, only nice shades of gray… but that’s not my fault.