material-decoration

Material-ish window decoration theme for KWin.

Locally Integrated Menu & Search

This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the titlebar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don't export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only).

Hold Alt to show menu mnemonics; press the indicated letter to open a menu.

Configuration

Make sure you add the AppMenu button in System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons….

There, by clicking the pencil icon that is displayed when you select the Material theme, you can modify various aspects of the decoration, both in terms of appearance and behaviour. For example, you can transform it into a hamburger menu, disable the search function, and even decide whether to include inactive actions (those that are greyed out) in the search results.

Note: if you configure the decoration to use Opacity < 100%, Better Blur effect is strongly recommended on Wayland.

Actions on Press-and-Hold buttons

Pressing and holding the “Close” button will minimize the window to the traybar if the kwin-minimize2tray script is present and enabled ( AUR package).

On Plasma 6.6, pressing and holding the "Minimize" button will minimize ALL windows but the active one on Plasma 6.6 (Wayland). This requires MinimizeAll script (please enable it in System Settings). For X11, please copy the directory /usr/share/kwin-wayland/scripts/minimizeall to /usr/share/kwin-x11/scripts/minimizeall.

Tiling layout popup

Hold the Maximize button with the left mouse button to open the tiling selector.

In Button options, you can also enable opening the popup by hovering over Maximize/Restore.

The bottom-left preview shows the current monitor's custom layout (Meta+T).

The popup uses a companion Material Tiling Popup KWin script for native quick tiling. The script is enabled by default unless explicitly disabled in System Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts. If the script was disabled, enable it in that panel.

After the first installation, log out and log back in so KWin discovers and loads the companion script.

Mnemonics

When you press Alt, the widget displays the keyboard shortcuts for opening menus, just like in traditional menu bars. For example, pressing Alt+F opens the “File” menu.

Limitations: due to the way the Qt toolkit works, you may need to press the key combination (e.g., Alt+F) twice if there is already an element (e.g., a button) in the application interface associated with that shortcut.

Installation

Ubuntu

You can find the Ubuntu deb package in the latest release page.

Fedora

The package is in Terra repository.

Arch and derivatives

Please install the AUR package material-kwin-decoration-git.

A pre-built package is present in chaotic-aur.

Build instructions for Plasma 6

Requires a C++20 compiler, CMake, extra-cmake-modules, Qt 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDecoration3.

Optional: libwayland development files, wayland-scanner and plasma-wayland-protocols ≥ 1.15 enable showing menu mnemonics while holding Alt on Wayland. Without them, menu shortcuts still work. These optional packages are not needed with -DFORCE_X11=ON.

Debian / Ubuntu

Use a release that provides KDecoration3 and the Plasma version supported by this branch.

sudo apt install build-essential cmake extra-cmake-modules gettext git \
  qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-tools-dev libkdecorations3-dev \
  libkf6config-dev libkf6configwidgets-dev libkf6coreaddons-dev \
  libkf6guiaddons-dev libkf6i18n-dev libkf6iconthemes-dev \
  libkf6kcmutils-dev libkf6service-dev libkf6widgetsaddons-dev \
  libkf6windowsystem-dev libx11-dev libxcb1-dev

Optional, for Wayland Alt monitoring:

sudo apt install libwayland-dev libwayland-bin plasma-wayland-protocols

Fedora

sudo dnf install gcc-c++ make cmake extra-cmake-modules gettext git \
  qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel qt6-qttools-devel kdecoration-devel \
  kf6-kconfig-devel kf6-kconfigwidgets-devel kf6-kcoreaddons-devel \
  kf6-kguiaddons-devel kf6-ki18n-devel kf6-kiconthemes-devel \
  kf6-kcmutils-devel kf6-kservice-devel kf6-kwidgetsaddons-devel \
  kf6-kwindowsystem-devel libX11-devel libxcb-devel vulkan-headers

Optional, for Wayland Alt monitoring:

sudo dnf install wayland-devel plasma-wayland-protocols

Arch and derivatives

On Arch Linux, the package dependencies are:

• Runtime: kwin, plus wayland when Wayland Alt monitoring is compiled in.
• Build: base-devel, cmake, extra-cmake-modules, git, vulkan-headers; add plasma-wayland-protocols ≥ 1.15 and wayland for Wayland Alt monitoring. The wayland package includes the development files and wayland-scanner.
• Optional: plasma-x11-session for X11; appmenu-gtk-module for GTK menus on X11 or appmenu-gtk-module-wayland on Wayland; kwin-minimize2tray-git for the Close button's long-press action; kwin-effects-better-blur-dx for translucent titlebars on Wayland.

Compile and install

git clone https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration.git
cd material-decoration
mkdir build
cmake -B build . # add this for SonicDE: -DFORCE_X11=ON
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
sudo cmake --install build

NOTE 1: the master branch is aligned with the latest Plasma version but it is compatible with Plasma 6.5+. For earlier ones, see the other (ummantained) branches.

NOTE 2: After 5 August 2026 the Decoration Id changed, please select again Material in Systemsettings, if needed.