NowPlaying is a KDE Plasma 6 widget inspired by the Cleartext Rainmeter widget. It displays the current song and artist with compact media controls, and is meant to live on the desktop rather than in a panel.

https://www.pling.com/p/2195583/

I think this is pretty much in a "done" state now feature-wise, except of course any bug fixes

Prerequisites

You need the basic KDE and Qt 6 tools for Plasma widget development.

On Arch Linux, this is roughly:

sudo pacman -S plasma-sdk inotify-tools kirigami2 qt6-base qt6-declarative

Development

Run the widget directly from the local package:

make dev

Other test modes are available:

make dev MODE=panel
make dev MODE=desktop
make dev MODE=hidpi

Use hot reload while editing:

make watch

Install or upgrade the widget in your local Plasma package store:

make install

Create a distributable package:

make package

Customization

The widget appearance can be tuned from the Plasma widget settings, including:

custom multiline label text
independent label, title, and artist font sizes
title/artist vertical spacing
NOW/PLAYING label vertical spacing
separator gap from labels
separator gap from track text
separator height percentage

Release Upload

Required GitHub repository secrets:

PLING_PROJECT_ID
PLING_USERNAME
PLING_PASSWORD

To dry run

uv run --env-file .env python scripts/pling_upload.py --dry-run

Credits

Full credit to the Windows creator for the original idea. I just made a KDE clone.