plasmoidviewer

If you're writing Plasmoids, testing them is made a lot easier with plasmoidviewer. With scripted Plasmoids you can even skip the compile stage and go straight to ... damn ... plasmapkg -u <path/to/package>. Having to run that command every time and wait for the call to ksycoca is a major buzz kill. It's like racing on the autobahn with the wind in your hair only to hit a playground zone.

A small voice whispered in my ear, "Use the source, Luke!" and I was like, "Dude, for the millionth time, my name's not Luke!" Having ghostly voices whisper mystic wisdom in your ear is bad enough, but at least he could get my name right. ;P

So I added Applet::loadPlasmoid to libplasma and added a couple lines to plasmoidviewer so that you can have it load Plasmoids right from their location on disk without installing them. This means if your package is in ~/src/MyAwesomePlasmoid you can just do: `plasmoidviewer ~/src/MyAwesomePlasmoid`. Even better, if you are in ~/src/MyAwesomePlasmoid you can just do `plasmoidviewer .` Having accomplished that I realized that even that was one character too much and so with a very minor tweak (involving deleting a couple of lines, actually) you can now sit in the root of your Plasmoid structure and run `plasmoidviewer` and up comes your work.

Plasmate will make this even easier, but until it's ready and for those of us who are console addicted this is quite nice. Speaking of Plasmate, it also required this new Applet::loadPlasmoid method. We had an irc meeting today about Plasmate with a couple of SoC/SoK students. Artur led it and Richard Moore helped steer the discussion. I was asleep for most of it (dang timezones!), but they did a great job without me (no big surprise there :) and it seems we'll be off to a running start in no time on getting Plasmate in working order.