Material decoration with Locally Integrated Menu (and Search) sees its first official release
The first official release (26.08.05) of Material Decoration was released today; it is currently the only decoration for Plasma 6 that integrates the menu into the title bar, as well as featuring a search function within the menu itself.
In recent months, in the run-up to the release, the focus has been primarily on optimizing search function and improving stability.
1. Locally Integrated Menu
2. Search
3. Other functions and Options
A lot of options available in the configuration module under System Settings:
- window title alignment
- button size
- title bar opacity (it is recommended to use Better Blur instead of the default kwin effect)
- rounded corners (top-only or top+bottom) radius
- customizable border colors
- use system font for the menu (the default is to use the titlebar font)
- show the window title when the mouse hovers over the decoration
- show the menu only when the mouse hovers over it (otherwise show the title)
- convert the menu into a single button (hamburger)
- enable/disable search
- exclude/include the various menu/sub-menu levels from the search
- change spacing between buttons
- use the system colors (default)
- adjusting shadows and animations
- enable/disable the special functions of the buttons (MinimizeAll and MinimizeToTray)
- enable/disable drag-and-drop from buttons (close, minimise, etc.)
4. Buttons special functions
- You can minimize all windows but the active one pressing and holding the minimize button
- You can minimize the window in the system tray bar (requires kwin-minimize2tray)
- As far as I know, this is the only decoration that allows you to drag the window from anywhere on the decoration, including the buttons
5. History
The idea of a menu integrated with the title bar originally came from Ubuntu Unity. KDE 4 had also incorporated this feature, which was subsequently lost in KDE 5. u/Zren created the Material theme with LIM for KDE 5 (the Material design had been created by Zzag). u/nicman23 ported it to Plasma 6, and finally guiodic added the search function, made it work on Wayland as well, and added several customizable options.
6. How to get it
- Build from source: https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration
- On Arch and derivatives, install
material-kwin-decoration-gitfrom the AUR. Precompiled package is available inchaotic-aur. Non è ancora presente un PKGBUILD per la versione stabile poiché AUR è bloccato.
Requirements
- Plasma 6.5+ for the master branch, working older versions are in other branches but are not updated/maintained.
- Works both on Wayland and X11 session!
Feature requests? Bugs?
- open an issue here: https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration/issues
Posted Aug 5, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC