Plasma and everything KDE develops is designed for demanding users. For example, the Spectacle capture tool allows annotations and will soon be able to read text. Furthermore, for many years it has offered the option to fill the screen with Plasma widgetsThese are also known as Plasmoids, and they can be great… or a disaster if you like clean environments. I'm more of a "clean" type, but I also like to use some of these Plasma widgets from time to time.
For me, the clearest example of the previous capture is the color picker plasmoid. There's a more complete application called KColorChooserBut I've never needed that much. Sometimes I just want to select a color and get its code. Period. And I don't want that window constantly floating on my desktop, nor do I want it in any panel. Just for something specific. Luckily, KDE offers an option to use them in window form..
Plasma widgets in windows, not as graphic elements
The way to achieve this is not at all simple. I remember months or a year ago that this color picker could be invoked from Kickoff (the app launcher), but it disappeared. Now, the official way to use it is by adding the graphic element somewhere. There is an unofficial way that works at the time of writing this article, and it involves using the command plasmawindowed followed by the Plasma or Plasmoid widget. For example:
plasmawindowed org.kde.plasma.colorpicker
It will launch the color picker in a window.
If you want to see a list of what's available with their respective names, you'll usually find it in the path /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/, and some more with the .so extension (which would have to be removed to launch them) in /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/plasma/applets/.
Not all of them work perfectly. For example, the weather app doesn't display anything, and the timer is difficult to set precisely because it relies on the mouse wheel when it's in a window. But there are other very useful ones, such as the aforementioned color picker, sticky notes, or even the web browser, which can be used to browse the web without cookies in a very basic way, which comes in handy sometimes, at least for me.
Add them to the applications menu for easier launching
Although the command can be launched from the terminal, I recommend adding it to the startup menu. One way to do this is create a .desktop fileAnother, more recommended, option is to use the Plasma menu editor, which is usually installed by default in KDE desktop distributions. Using this menu is very intuitive: simply open it, click on "New," and on the right, give it a name, a comment, and the command in the "Program" field. The correct way is to put "plasmawindowed" in the program field and the name of the Plasma widget as arguments, but if you put everything in the command field, the menu editor usually corrects it automatically.
And that would be it. More productivity, but without losing order and on demand.