March 14, 2010 — Hans

Mostly as a reminder to myself, here’s how to show remaining battery time in the Battery Monitor widget shipped with KDE Software Compilation >= 4.3:

Right click on the battery and choose “Battery Monitor Settings” Enable “Show charge information” and click on “OK” Quit plasma-desktop with the command

kquitapp plasma-desktop Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc in your favorite text editor (some distributions use other paths, for example ~/.kde/... ) Search for the term

showBatteryString=true and add the following line directly below it: showRemainingTime=true Start plasma-desktop again

plasma-desktop

You may disable “Show charge information” now if you want.

Credits to Sebastian Kügler for posting the instructions on the plasma-devel mailing list. I’ll try to also add them to Userbase when I have some more free time.

Note that I do not want a flame war here about if this should be the default setting/configurable in the GUI – it’s been discussed before, and complaining here won’t make any difference.

Enjoy!