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monolalia → M’kay Computer → Plasma menu tweak for custom system applications

Have YOU, TOO, ever missed a shortcut to your favourite package manager, terminal emulator, or process monitor on Plasma’s “Application Launcher”² widget’s sparsely populated “Computer” tab¹?

While you can right-click application menu entries and add them to or remove them from your favourites, there’s no obvious way to add further system applications to the few offered under the “Applications” header on the “Computer” tab. (And no, I don’t mean the applications in the “System” submenu on the “Applications” tab. I really do mean system applications under the... excuse me. I may have asked barely-listening people for support once too often. They go off on some keyword they spotted without actually comprehending what you said.)

There’re two ways that I can see to remedy this.

Either edit the correct “SystemApplications” line in the configuration for your particular instance of the Kickoff widget in “$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc”³ —

— or, and this method is much less fragile, edit the widget’s defaults in “/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/config/main.xml” or a local copy of it in “$XDG_DATA_HOME/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/config/main.xml”³.

(When using a local copy, your changes will persist across Plasma updates, although you might want to merge them with the new version every now and then.)

Simply find this section and fill it in with the “.desktop” files representing your preferred System applications:

<entry name="systemApplications" type="StringList">
    <label>List of applications at the top of the "Computer" tab.</label>
    <default>systemsettings.desktop,org.kde.ksysguard.desktop,
    org.kde.ksystemlog.desktop,org.kde.filelight.desktop,
    org.kde.konsole.desktop,syncthing-ui.desktop,grsync.desktop,
    gufw.desktop,org.keepassxc.KeePassXC.desktop</default>
</entry>

You’ll find these “.desktop” files in “/usr(/local)/share/applications” or, if overriden by or installed for your local user account, “$XDG_DATA_HOME/applications”³.

A “Run command…” entry will be added automatically.

Remove and re-add the “Application Launcher” widget, and that will have been that.

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¹it looks different as of Plasma 5.21, but the principle, the problem and the solution remain the same

²internally called “Kickoff”

³when empty (and by default they are), “XDG_CONFIG_HOME” is “/home/username/.config” and “XDG_DATA_HOME” is “/home/username/.local/share”