Digital Clock — Padded Automatic

A KDE Plasma 6 Digital Clock variant that keeps automatic font sizing responsive to display scale and panel thickness while allowing adjustable vertical padding.

Why

KDE's stacked automatic layout sizes the time to 56% of the panel height and the secondary label to 80% of the time label. Together they consume 100.8% of the panel height, leaving effectively no vertical breathing room.

This variant computes the available content height from a configurable per-side padding value:

content height = panel height × (1 − 2 × padding)

The default is 10% per side. Each clock instance can use a different value from 0% to 30%.

Install

Download the .plasmoid release, then run:

kpackagetool6 --type Plasma/Applet --install digital-clock-padded-automatic-1.0.0.plasmoid

Add Digital Clock — Padded Automatic from Plasma's widget picker.

For development installs:

kpackagetool6 --type Plasma/Applet --install package

Build a release package

From the repository root:

cd package
zip -r ../digital-clock-padded-automatic-1.0.0.plasmoid .

Compatibility

• KDE Plasma 6
• Tested on Plasma 6.7.3, Wayland, and fractional display scaling

The widget uses KDE's private Digital Clock and calendar QML modules. Those APIs can change between Plasma releases, so future Plasma versions may require a rebase.

Upstream

The underlying default-sizing fix and padding control are also maintained as a two-commit patch for KDE's plasma-workspace repository. See upstream/ for the patches plus ready-to-submit Bugzilla and merge request descriptions.

Screenshots

Original automatic sizing	Automatic sizing with 12% padding

License

This is a derivative of KDE Plasma's Digital Clock. Original authorship and SPDX headers are retained. The project is distributed under the same GPL-compatible terms; see LICENSES/.