It would be lovely to have the "Application Menu, a launcher based on cascading popup menus" as an icon in my i3bar to have a general overview of the packages I have installed in my system, within each categories (Internet, Games etc.) I could not figure out how to start the applet in the i3 environment. Is there a command that could call the applet itself (may also start some KDE process that runs ONLY in the background)? Obviously, I do not want to start the whole KDE5.
I found that running plasmashell -ws or plasmashell --windowed --shut-up starts the whole KDE desktop as a window which can also manage windows started from within i3wm. However, that is such an overkill to just start one component/plasmoid. I found that kcmshell{4,5} can be used to call a collection of modules that are available via kcmshell{4,5} --list, but they are seemingly not plasmoids.
Best Answer
After a thorough study on KDE5 API, I found the answer to my own question. To start kicker (Application Menu) form within a command line WITHOUT starting the whole KDE desktop, simply run:
We can also run a lot of other plasmoids. To see a list of all plasmoids installed, run both of the following:
Here is the API page: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma5/QML2/GettingStarted
Here is a more complete API page: https://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/PlasmaDesktopScripting