Another busy month, another round of great features being worked on. March featured our Plasma 5.6 release which had lots of last minute (aka bug fixing) focus. We had our sprint at CERN. But of course also new code was added.

One of the features on my TODO list for Plasma 5.7 is the ASCII art output rendering. Mplayer supports that and while that is nice, it’s not really a good solution. It would be way more convenient to have the complete workspace rendered through ASCII art to not have to implement this feature in every application.

So without much further ado I’m happy to announce the caca platform for KWin:



Unfortunately it’s only supported by our QPainter based compositor. Thus to run it, you need to make sure to use KWIN_COMPOSE=Q to pick the QPainter backend (yeah we should improve that to have a better automatic selection). This is the first platform which support both nested and full mode. Thus you can run with –ascii in your normal X session which will open a window, just like our nested X11 platform plugin. The rendering is done through the great caca library.

What I’m personally impressed about is how small this new platform plugin is. Less than 400 lines of code, great job by libcaca. But it also shows how easy it is to get KWin on a new platform.