How to change the height of the Kickoff Application Launcher menu in KDE Plasma

The height of the KDE Plasma Kickoff Application Launcher menu is not user-configurable, which is odd in a Desktop Environment with a reputation for being highly user-configurable.

It turns out that the height and width of the pop-up menu are hard-coded in the ASCII file /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml:

root # grep -E "Layout.minimumHeight.*units.gridUnit" /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml
    Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit * 34

root # grep -E "Layout.minimumWidth.*units.gridUnit" /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml
    Layout.minimumWidth: units.gridUnit * 26

Now, I was a bit fed up having to scroll up and down the launcher menu to see all fourteen entries in my Favourites list, so I decided to increase the height of the menu, which I did by editing /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml as root user:

root # nano /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml
root # grep -E "Layout.minimumHeight.*units.gridUnit" /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml
    Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit * 44

The only downside to this is that the file will be overwritten when the package kde-plasma/plasma-desktop is upgraded.

The following command would allow me to make sure the file contains the height value of ’44’ that I want:

root # sed -i '/Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit/ c\    Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit * 44' /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml

Therefore, to automate the editing of the file in my Gentoo installations that use OpenRC I created a shell script /etc/local.d/50-set_Kickoff_height.start with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -e /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml ]; then
    sed -i '/Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit/ c\    Layout.minimumHeight: units.gridUnit * 44' /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/FullRepresentation.qml
fi

The FullRepresentation.qml file will then be edited every time the machine boots, which is a tad inefficient but not a big overhead.

This is not a perfect solution because the menu will revert to its default height following an upgrade to the package kde-plasma/plasma-desktop until I reboot the machine, but it is good enough for me.