plasma-restart

name	plasma-restart
description	Restart Plasma components (plasmashell, krunner, kglobalaccel, polkit-kde-authentication-agent, kded) without logging out. Use when a config change isn't taking effect or a Plasma process is misbehaving.

Plasma Component Restart

Restarting individual Plasma components is almost always preferable to logging out.

plasmashell (taskbar, panels, desktop)

kquitapp6 plasmashell 2>/dev/null || killall plasmashell
sleep 1
kstart plasmashell

If plasmashell is wedged and kquitapp6 hangs, killall -9 plasmashell then kstart plasmashell.

krunner

kquitapp6 krunner 2>/dev/null || killall krunner
# krunner relaunches on demand (Alt+Space)

kglobalaccel (global shortcuts)

kquitapp6 kglobalaccel 2>/dev/null || killall kglobalaccel
kstart kglobalaccel

kded (background services)

kquitapp6 kded6 2>/dev/null || killall kded6
kstart kded6

KWin (window manager) — Wayland caveats

On X11, kwin_x11 --replace & works. On Wayland, KWin is the compositor — restarting it ends the session. Don't restart kwin_wayland from inside a Plasma session. Workarounds:

• Trigger qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure to re-read config (most changes don't need a full restart).
• For a hard restart, log out and back in.

Polkit agent

kquitapp6 polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 2>/dev/null || killall polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1 &

Notes

• kquitapp6 is graceful (asks via D-Bus). killall is a fallback. -9 is a last resort.
• After a plasmashell restart, ephemeral state (open Klipper history, plasmoid scroll positions) is preserved because they're persisted on quit.