Plasma 5 with KDE Telepathy 0.9

While every effort in KDE Telepathy went to the Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 porting and KAccounts migration, there are still distros/users that have KDE Telepathy 0.9 (the kde4 one) running in Plasma 5 session. All the applications of KDE Telepathy work just fine, the only problem are the Plasma applets, those are totally incompatible.

So for those cases I've created a small Plasma 5 applet which works with KDE Telepathy 0.9. It can bring your accounts online or offline or open the contact list and accounts settings, just as you're used to and the only dependency is TelepathyQt5. However because of changes in Plasma 5 stuff, it's not perfect.

Every applet in Plasma's systray now must have a full popup-on-click by design. This is in direct contrast with Plasma from kde4 times where applet could be just an icon. This hinders the effect of bringing the contact list up upon simply clicking the applet; now it will open a popup with a button inside. There are two solutions to this though. As middle-mouse button click can still be handled however we want, I've added opening the contact list window to middle-mouse button click too. Or you can just put the applet on the panel, there it will work just fine and you can't tell the difference.

Which applet is which?

 

I've also considered having the icon simply be a KStatusNotifierItem, but that brings more problems than it solves, namely something needs to create and manage it, which would mean new process or new kded4 module and all this complexity was not really worth it, given this is supposed to be a sort of short-time transition crutch only. But other than that small issue, everything works just the same as its newer brother.

The new applet from 15.04 release then features a quick contact list in the popup with a search field so you don't even need to open the full contact list, but you still can either by middle-mouse clicking or from the context menu.

The new KDE Telepathy applet in 15.04

I don't intend to work on the legacy applet anymore, but if you wish to extend it, you can either get it from kde:scratch/mklapetek/ktp-legacy-presence-applet.git or download the tarball from KDE mirrors (there will be version 1.1 released the same date as KDE Applications 15.04).

Comments

[Sudhir Khanger]

Are there any plans to rebrand the whole messaging thing in Plasma 5? KDE IM Contacts, KDE Telepathy, Instant Messaging and VOIP, Instant Messaging Contact, etc. are a little confusing.

[BucharJ]

Thanks! I made a pkgbuild for Arch - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/telepathy-kde-desktop-applets-legacy/

[Marty]

@Sudhir - not for the upcoming release, but yes, it's something that should happen. I did raise the issue of naming many times (at least 4 afair), but it always was met with either people not caring or people claiming naming is not important, so I gave up, really...

@Buchar - thanks!

[Alexey Korepov]

Thanks, this way of widget works much better. Is new versions of KDE Telepathy compartible with systems, using KDE4 and Plasma1?

[Marty]

Yes. The only thing not compatible are the applets, which is why this one exists.

[Otiakot]

What happened to SIPE support via libpurble. I am missing it in 0.9 on Fedora 22.

[Alexey Korepov]

Is there any way to initiate chat with specific contact via command line or dbus command (with closed ktp-text-ui app)?
I need to create button on Plasma panel with link to contact, for quick open chat window (new or already opened) with this person.

[D]

I would like to ask a simple doubt. In my KDE IM messenger, which I use for Google Chat / Gmail chat / Google Hangout Chat, it asked me my gmail username and password for web authentication and it passed. But now, it stores my password credentials and next time, I reboot/relogin my machine, KDE IM automatically takes and connect to gmail.

I want to turn off this feature, I want KDE IM ask me to put password to connect each time, I login. I checked KDE IM settings but I am not able to find such option

any help would be thankful

--jeevs