Showerthoughts Plasmoid: Putting Reddit Posts On Your Desktop

The Showerthoughts Plasmoid is a nifty little app to get a post from a Reddit "subreddit" onto your Plasma desktop. It simply allows you to select one or more subreddits in the Plasmoid's settings, seprated by a comma, and off you go. It's called Showerthoughts Plasmoid due to the Subreddit /r/Showerthought's popularity, as well as from the original inspiration for the author making the Plasmoid.

According to the author, the Plasmoid was inspired by a Reddit post in /r/Linux, where a creative user posted a script for showing a Showerthoughts post every time he fired up a terminal. Thus, the idea for making the Plasmoid was born.

Here I am running 2 instances of the
Plasmoid at once: One for /r/Showerthoughts
and one for /r/KDE

There are thousands of subreddits, and any can be used here. The ones I'm using here are for example's sake. Feel free to explore Reddit and find some that interest you. Some others I occasionally view are /r/linuxmasterrace, /r/linux, /r/kubuntu, /r/nottheonion (very funny real-life stories), and /r/explainlikeimfive. You get the idea - there's a group for literally almost anything, and you can even create your own.

 

Using the Showerthoughts Plasmoid 

Once installed, there are a few quick and simple options to go over, and that's it. On the General tab, simply select the subreddit(s) desired to be shown, and whether they should contain just the post title, post image, or both. One thing to note here is that while you can have multiple subreddits defined in the settings, only one quote will be shown at at time. You can refresh as often as you like to change it and this works as long as you are comfortable only seeing one post from one subreddit at a time. As shown in the image above, I got around this simply by having two instances of the Plasmoid running at once.  All in all it doesn't look bad in my humble opinion.

You can also apply filters on the posts shown as well, by selecting options from the drop-down selectors.

There's quite a selection here, as you can select from the following filters:

• Top
• New
• Hot
• Rising
• Controversial 

And from the following timeframes:

• Last hour
• Day
• Week 
• Month
• Year
• Always

Since I'm at my computer most days, I have mine set to show the top posts of the day, but it's also fun on occasion to change it up a bit as well.

On the Advanced tab, we can set things like text colors, NSFW filter, and mouse actions. I like the text color selection a lot, and wish it was standard on any Plasmoid, since having different theme colors and Plasmoid text colors can really wreck a customized desktop look. Props to the author for adding it per a user's request.

Left-clicking will refresh the display, while middle-clicking will open the original link in your browser, in case you want to comment or read others' comments - often an entertaining endeavor in it's own right.

Getting the Showerthoughts Plasmoid

The Plasmoid can be installed directly from the Add New Widgets dialog within KDE Plasma, or downloaded from the KDE Store.

Links: 

- Showerthoughts plasmoid in the KDE Store
- Get a random /r/showerthoughts post as your shell greeting
- What are subreddits?