Quick Tip: Customize the default KDE Plasma settings

Wednesday, November 2, 2022, Martin Broadbeck

I am happy to manage our computers at home. Sometimes it happens that a new laptop has to be set up and matching users need to be created. We’re using KDE Plasma as our desktop environment, and I’ve always been annoyed with one of the default settings or the other. For example, b-one (!) Click on a file or directory. Turning this into the most enjoyable behavior (for me) for each user, which requires a double click, is a bit boring or at least annoying in the long run.

How can this be done more elegantly?

In the meantime, you should check exactly where the corresponding setting is saved. With a little detective work, one quickly comes to the conclusion that this is the line SingleClick=false It is located in the file ~/.config/kdeglobals.

And now comes /etc/xdg in the game. If in the home directory (~/.config/[…]) Otherwise, settings from /etc/xdg. You can easily check it because kf5-config --path config produces the following:

/home/myuser/.config/:/home/myuser/.config/kdedefaults/:/etc/xdg/

So now you can log in /etc/xdg/kdeglobals Enter the required settings; You may have to create the file first. So in our example:

If nothing else is specified in the user’s home directory (under ~/.config), the settings under /etc/xdg now apply. Of course, users can still specify their own settings that override the default settings – as desired.