Mostly as a reminder to myself, here’s how to show remaining battery time in the Battery Monitor widget shipped with KDE Software Compilation >= 4.3:
Remaining time in the Battery Monitor
- Right click on the battery and choose “Battery Monitor Settings”
- Enable “Show charge information” and click on “OK”
- Quit plasma-desktop with the command
kquitapp plasma-desktop - Open
~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrcin your favorite text editor (some distributions use other paths, for example~/.kde/...) - Search for the term
showBatteryString=trueand add the following line directly below it:
showRemainingTime=true - Start plasma-desktop again
plasma-desktop
You may disable “Show charge information” now if you want.
Credits to Sebastian Kügler for posting the instructions on the plasma-devel mailing list. I’ll try to also add them to Userbase when I have some more free time.
Note that I do not want a flame war here about if this should be the default setting/configurable in the GUI – it’s been discussed before, and complaining here won’t make any difference.
Enjoy!
Who Says Penguins Can't Fly? 
March 14, 2010 at 23:09
Hi Hans,
thanks for this information. What is the basis of this time estimate (acpi information I guess).
Regards
Jim
March 14, 2010 at 23:09
Which Plasma theme is that? Looks nice
March 14, 2010 at 23:26
@JimYC:
Unfortunately I can’t answer your question, but it seems to be reported by HAL (see link below). From my small search I also discovered that Sebastian Kügler has already blogged about this feature (which I failed to find prior to writing this blog post :():
http://vizzzion.org/blog/2009/11/battery-improvements-in-kde-plasma-4-4/
@Markus:
It’s Glassified.
March 14, 2010 at 23:57
@Hans,
I didn’t see it either, therefore Sebastian will be quite happy that you “found” it again. Anyways, the link answered all my questions. Keep up the good work.
JimYC
March 15, 2010 at 9:20
Nice that someone brought this feature to knowledge of avarage users!
March 15, 2010 at 16:48
If you are dumb like me, don’t forget to unplug the AC adaptor! Else you won’t see any difference =)
March 15, 2010 at 19:46
@Adriano
You were not the only one… 😉
March 15, 2010 at 21:04
[…] Remaining time in the Battery Monitor widget Mostly as a reminder to myself, here’s how to show remaining battery time in the Battery Monitor widget shipped with KDE Software Compilation >= 4.3… […]
March 16, 2010 at 1:03
Or just use Fedora, which enables this feature by default:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/kdebase-workspace/devel/kdebase-workspace-4.3.98-battery-plasmoid-showremainingtime.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup
In fact, we just make the popup always show the remaining time. We don’t enable the option you describe for a simple reason: the overlay shown on mouseover should really in percent, not time. Try mousing over that tiny icon and watch it try to display the remaining time as a time. There’s no way this will fit. In addition, I don’t see the benefit of offering to hide this information in the popup, where there’s plenty of room to display it.
March 16, 2010 at 1:53
@Kevin Kofler:
Not sure I understand what you mean. When I mouse over the battery icon, the overlay only shows the remaining battery capacity in percent.
With that said, I use KDEMod packages which seems to use the same patch as the one you linked to (and one for the battery tooltip). If I remember correctly “remaining time” was always displayed by default, but in the recent 4.4.x versions I had to enable it as described above.
March 17, 2010 at 8:51
[…] VIA | http://hanschen.org/ […]
March 21, 2010 at 0:54
@Hans:
> When I mouse over the battery icon, the overlay only shows the remaining battery capacity in percent.
That’s probably because:
> With that said, I use KDEMod packages which seems to use the same patch as the one you linked to
🙂
If you use the option described in the blog post (which you can still do even with the patch), you’ll see what happens.
> If I remember correctly “remaining time” was always displayed by default, but in the recent 4.4.x versions I had to enable it as described above.
It was displayed by default until 4.2, they disabled it in 4.3 (and kept it disabled in 4.4). We’ve been patching it in Fedora ever since.
March 21, 2010 at 0:56
PS: We’re patching this because our users complained about the regression, see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=515166
May 5, 2010 at 15:25
In Plasma Netbook 4.4.2, the overlay only shows percentage, even with the modification of plasma-netbook-appletsrc. The remaining time will only show in the popup.
Under Plasma Desktop 4.3, the overlay showed remaining time. But the space occupied in the panel by the widget was larger than necessary, probably because of the space needed to display the time.
I wanted to have a quick look at the remaining time, so I configured a keyboard shortcut for the widget.
May 5, 2010 at 15:34
@Sylvain Chamberland:
You might want to try this plasmoid: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Battery+Time+Remaining?content=123767
July 28, 2010 at 3:49
Thanks a million!!! It works!
September 4, 2012 at 14:32
This feature have been removed with no explanation recently:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304510
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-workspace/repository/revisions/a6f8377ccdec5bf3a9a07c4f217583b7d18b7133
Do you have any idea why? Probably you can undo this this commit or resubmit the feature again?
September 6, 2012 at 9:18
@anton:
Seems like it’ll be back: https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-workspace/repository/revisions/55c659ab876ea8f2e0b660f350bcb6a7f63d5931
April 3, 2013 at 10:56
Excellent.. after an upgrade to KDE 4.10.1 the “remaining time” wasn’t displayed… this worked wonderfully… although I wish the perview while the mouse hovers over the battery icon, shows the timing information as well. Is there a similar field-value pair in the same file which can display the timing information on the preview as well?
April 4, 2013 at 0:16
@Anand Ramesh:
I don’t think so (actually, I thought this option had been removed in 4.10 as well). You could try this plasmoid but I’m not sure if it still works.
June 16, 2013 at 13:18
Thank you for posting the instructions to display ‘time remaining.’ It really is very useful even though not 100% accurate, I can now make informed decisions about usage. esp. when out outside…
November 29, 2013 at 6:02
Wow! Thanks a lot!