In D2872#53355, @davidedmundson wrote:

Worst, krunner framework still reads enabledCategories, so if something was disabled there's no way to enable it.

Finally this leaves frameworks krunner documentation being wrong.

i did test it and it appeared to work correctly.
I incorrectly assumed that this categories->plugin translation was done at kcm level, while in reality things are more broken than that.
It was appearing to work correctly because i'm seeing now into krunner framework code, it's actually using a quite weird mixup of looking at categories and the plugin based one, so if a category is enabled (or all categories are disabled), if i enable/disable the plugin, the plugin will get enabled/disabled correctly.

since instead changes in the framework will be needed, this makes things a bit more difficult, because it becomes difficult to see what would happen when a newer framework would be used on old workspace.

probably the only way things would work is:

• framework keeping supporting both categories and plugins as is now
• workspace (not the framework) gets a kconfigupdate that converts the list of categories to list of plugins, removing completely the categoriesenabled key, this (not sure if intended but already happens in the framework) makes the behavior revert completely to plugin-based config

with the kconfig update script of https://phabricator.kde.org/D2873 the krunner configuration seems to have proper plugins enabled