Is there a way to configure panels without using the GUI?

[DinoNerd]

An upgrade glitch lost me all my KDE configuration. (I trusted some bad advice. Oops.)

The GUI for creating and managing panels is not intuitive to me. Moreover, when I'm in the results of clicking "show panel configuration" I cannot see any instructions I may (or may not) have found for using it.

I have 2 monitors.I want two identical panels on the bottom of each monitor.

I don't want to create a new panel - which seemingly can't be placed, so winds up on the top of the first monitor, then find an edit option that lets me move it to the other monitor, but only to the top of that screen - still no apparent way to place it. And then drag and drop elements to each panel, having to add them twice each time I remember another one I previously had.

The first time I set this up I had an intro for newbies that I *may* be able to find again, but was never able to get precisely what I wanted.

Hence my query: is there an editable config file, with accurate documentation, so I can bypass this GUI?!

I'm on Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, KDE Plasma 6.6.4 KDE Frameworks 6.24.0

Failing that, could someone point me to the latest and greatest documentation for the GUI tool? Ideally for a version that's functionally identical - IIRC the GUI tool for Kubuntu 24.10 behaved somewhat differently to what I see today, and also probably differently from the docs I had available.

[DinoNerd]

The KDE wiki suggests, at https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/pl...top/panel.html that the relevant file is .config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

Unfortunately it's not one of those wonderful old-style configuration files with comments explaining everything you can do, so I'm not much wiser.

[claydoh]

Just restore your entire backed-up config dir,

But you really should be able to move panels where you want - but it is two steps. One is for which screen, and the other is for the actual configuration.




Unfortunately, KDE has a long legacy of having many individual configs and data files, so just one thing may not handle all of them

If you do decide to restore that backed up dir, I do suggest doing so from outside of Plasma if possible (like a live usb), just because there will be things loaded into memory fighting with the things copied over. It isn't necessary, but imo it does make it smoother if there were a LOT of customizations on the desktop. In any case, the desktop needs to be restarted (logout is easiest) if you just restore the files in-place.


This is a good reason for adopting tools like Timeshift with btrfs, Rollbacks are lifesavers here.