Explanation

Keyboard accelerators are letters with an underscore that you see on buttons, labels etc. This feature is very useful for people who prefer to use the keyboard. For example, instead of using your mouse, you can click on OK by pressing Alt+O.

The downside is that it makes applications appear more cluttered. But not anymore. Starting from 4.8 (or did I just not notice this awesome feature until now?), you can configure Oxygen, the default style for KDE applications, to hide keyboard accelerators until you hold down the Alt key, or make them disappear completely.

So how do I do that?

• Open the System Settings module to configure Style
  (System Settings → (Common Appearance and Behavior →) Application Appearance → Style)
• Make sure you’ve selected the widget style “Oxygen“
• Click on Configure…
• Click on Show Advanced Configuration Options
• In the first tab (General), select an option for Keyboard accelerators visibility
  • Show Keyboard Accelerators When Needed (only shown when holding down Alt)
  • Always Hide Keyboard Accelerators
• Click on OK (or press Alt+O if you want to be fancy)

Enjoy your underline-free applications!

• The possibility to set a keyboard shortcut for each activity, for example Meta+F1 for the first activity, Meta+F2 for the second one etc.

This is actually already possible in 4.6, although it isn’t very straightforward for those of us who aren’t D-Bus wizards. However, since I know that there are other people who want this, I’ll share what I figured out today. After reading this post you’ll be able to set keyboard shortcuts (such as Meta+F1, Meta+F2 etc.) to switch to specific activities.

1. Find the activity id

Each activity has a globally unique identifier (GUID) which is a 32-character hexadecimal string. To get the GUID of the current activity, run the following command:

qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager CurrentActivity

Make a note of it somewhere. You can also get a list of all activity GUIDs with

qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager ListActivities

The list is ordered in the same way as the activities in the activity manager.

2. Create keyboard shortcuts

Now you have everything you need to create a keyboard shortcut for an activity.

1. Go to System Settings → Common Appearance and Behavior → Shortcuts and Gestures → Custom Shortcuts.
2. Click on Edit → New → Global Shortcut → D-Bus Command.
3. Enter a name for the shortcut. In the Trigger tab, click on the button that says None and press the shortcut you want to use (e.g. Meta+F1).
4. Click on the Action tab and enter the following:
• Remote application: org.kde.kactivitymanagerd
• Remote object: /ActivityManager
• Function: SetCurrentActivity
• Arguments: The GUID from the first step, e.g. a589200e-1983-4825-8275-50de36c223e5
5. Click on Apply.

Rinse and repeat. If you want the corresponding D-Bus command, for example to use it with another application, it is

qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager SetCurrentActivity "GUID"

where GUID is the GUID of the activity.

That’s basically it, have fun!

Continuing with activities after a hiatus, this time how to switch between them

Note that I’m using Plasma Desktop 4.6.x – some of things described might be different in earlier versions (for example different locations in System Settings), and some might not work at all.

Standard ways

Let’s start by reviewing some standard ways to change activities, i.e., ways that are available from a fresh setup. In the next section, “Additional ways”, the methods will require some tweaking, such as changing settings or installing additional programs. I won’t cover the case when you have “Different widgets for each desktop” enabled.

Mouse

By default there are two easy ways to access the activity manager by using your mouse:

• Click on the desktop Tool Box(usually in the top-right corner) and select Activities
• Right click on the desktop and select Activities…

From the activity manager, click on the activity you want to switch to. You can then close the manager by clicking on the close button, pressing Esc or by moving focus to a window (for example by clicking on the window).

Activity manager

The disadvantage of these methods is that you need to have access to the desktop in order to use them.

Keyboard

Personally I prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible. If you right click on the desktop you’ll see that the default keyboard shortcut to open the activity manager is

• Alt+D, Alt+A

It requires that the desktop has focus, which you can give it by clicking on a part of the desktop or by switching to an empty virtual desktop. This has the same problem as the mouse methods above. There is a solution though, called global shortcuts which work regardless of the application in focus (as long as it doesn’t steal the keyboard input). The default global shortcut for the activity manager is

• Meta+Q

Meta is usually the “Windows” key on standard keyboards. You can reassign the shortcut by clicking on the desktop Tool Box, select Shortcut Settings and click on the shortcut under “Global” on the “Activities…” row.

Finally there are two global keyboard settings to switch to the previous and next activity:

• Meta+Tab – Next Activity
• Meta+Shift+Tab – Previous Activity

They can be reassigned in System Settings → Common Appearance and Behavior → Shortcuts and Gestures → Global Keyboard Shortcuts → KDE component: Plasma Desktop Shell.

Additional ways

If you aren’t satisfied with the default ways to switch activities, here are suggestions for other methods you can use.

Mouse actions

If you like to use the mouse but find it troublesome to switch via the activity manager, there are faster ways. Plasma Workspaces allow you to define the actions different mouse buttons trigger on the desktop. For example, you can configure the left mouse button to pop up a context menu with your activities.

Context menu to switch between activities

Click on the desktop Tool Box and select Desktop Settings. Choose Mouse Actions in the left sidebar. You can either change one of the existing mouse actions, or you can add a new action. For example, try to click on Add Action…, click on the button again with your left mouse button and select Switch Activity in the drop-down list. Now you can switch activities by left clicking on the desktop and choosing the activity you want to switch to in the menu.

If you use the Switch Activity action with a scroll button it will switch to the previous/next activity instead of popping up a menu. By default vertical scroll is assigned to Switch Desktop, try to change it to Switch Activity and scroll up/down with the mouse pointer over the desktop to switch to the previous/next activity

These are just examples, of course you can use whichever mouse buttons you prefer. If you redefine the action of the right mouse button and can’t access the desktop right-click menu anymore, you can use the desktop Tool Box to open Desktop Settings again.

The problem with these methods is the same as before – you need access to the desktop to use them (note that they also work on the Dashboard). Unfortunately Plasma Workspaces don’t support global mouse shortcuts yet, but I’ll show you how to use another tool to achieve this under “Mouse shortcuts”. Before that, however, I’ll introduce another way to use the mouse – mouse gestures.

Mouse gestures

Mouse gestures allow you to trigger different actions by holding down a mouse button and making a gesture with the mouse. For example, moving the mouse in a straight line to the right while holding down the middle button could mean “Next activity”.

Before we can add new mouse gestures we need a command to switch activities and to show the activity manager. I couldn’t find any specific D-Bus calls to achieve this, but all shortcuts in KDE Software can be called using D-Bus. (There’s a “Send Keyboard Input” option in the System Settings module , but I can’t get it to invoke keyboard shortcuts.)

Go to System Settings → Common Appearance and Behavior → Shortcuts and Gestures → Custom Shortcuts. Click on Settings and make sure that “Start the Input Actions daemon on login” and “Gestures” are checked. “Mouse button” is the mouse button you hold down to activate a gesture. Personally I like to set it to 2, which in most cases is the middle mouse button.

To create a new gesture, click on Edit → New → Mouse Gesture Action → Command/URL. Click on the Trigger tab → Edit and draw the gesture in the new window while holding down the left mouse button.

Drawing a new mouse gesture

In the Action tab, you can use one of the following commands:

• qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "manage activities" #open the activity manager
• qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "Next Activity" #switch to next activity
• qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "Previous Activity" #switch to previous activity

After pressing Apply you can test your new mouse gestures. If they don’t work, make sure that the commands work, that the group and action are enabled (checkbox to the right), that gestures are enabled in the settings and that you hold down the correct mouse button.

Mouse shortcuts

As said Plasma Workspaces don’t support global mouse shortcuts yet, which is unfortunate given that many mouse models nowadays have extra buttons. However, it’s possible to set up mouse shortcuts using an application called xbindkeys. A more detailed post about mouse shortcuts can be found here.

So first of all, install xbindkeys. Open ~/.xbindkeysrc in a text editor. Here’s an example of a .xbindkeysrc to bind one mouse button, usually for the action “Back”, to open the activity manager, and vertical scroll to switch to the next/previous activity. The button numbering can vary so you might need to change the numbers (b:8 etc.) to work with your mouse.

# Activity manager
"qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "manage activities""
b:8

# Next activity
"qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "Next Activity""
b:7

# Previous activity
"qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "Previous Activity""
b:6

You can also use other buttons if you want – the xev command is useful for finding the button number.

Finding the mouse button with xev

When you’re satisfied with your configuration your need to start xbindkeys by running xbindkeys in a terminal (or Alt+F2). If xbindkeys already is running, you can use the following command to restart it: killall xbindkeys && xbindkeys

If you find that you need to start xbindkeys every time you login, add it to autostart in System Settings → System Administration → Startup and Shutdown → Autostart → Add Program… → xbindkeys → OK.

Icon

Yet another way to switch activities with your mouse is to put an icon on your desktop and/or panel.

An icon to show/hide the activity manager

Below you’ll find a .desktop file that opens the activity manager when clicked. Copy and paste the text in a text editor, save the file somewhere as activitymanager.desktop and you’ll have your own activity manager icon.

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Shows the activity manager
Exec=qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/plasma_desktop invokeShortcut "manage activities"\n
GenericName=Activity Manager
Icon=preferences-activities
Name=Activity Manager
StartupNotify=false
Type=Application
X-DBUS-StartupType=none
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false

The first time you click on the icon it will show a warning asking if you want to start the program. Make sure the command looks right, click on Continue, and the activity manager should show up.

You can easily adapt this desktop file to make icons for previous/next activity. The commands (Exec=) you need are listed at the end of the “Mouse gestures” section.

To add the icons to your desktop or panel, unlock your widgets and simply drag and drop them. See Plasma HowTo for more information.

Widgets

Finally, there are a few widgets you can use to switch activities. Activity bar is shipped with the default widgets and is exactly what it sounds like – a bar that shows your activities. A lot of people like to put it in a panel that is set to autohide, so that it stays out of the way most of the time.

Activity bar in a vertical and horizontal panel

While Activity bar provides a fast and easy way to switch between activities, it has some limitations. For example you can’t stop activities from it nor start already paused activities.

There’s a third-party widget called Activity Manager Plasmoid that acts as an alternative activity manager. It currently lacks some features compared to the original manager, such as the ability to create a new activity from a template, but for the purpose of switching between activities it does the job well. Activity Manager Plasmoid can be put on the desktop and panel as well as in the system tray.

Activity Manager Plasmoid in the system tray

These widgets are usually added to a panel to make them accessible all the time, independent of your current activity. (Your desktop changes depending on your activity.) Another solution could be to set the Dashboard to show an independent widget set instead of the current desktop and then use the Dashboard as an activity switcher. This option is found in System Settings → Workspace Appearance and Behavior → Workspace Behavior → Workspace → Dashboard: Show an Independent Widget set. Apply the setting, invoke the Dashboard (Ctrl+F12 by default) and add the widget(s) of your choice to it.

The future

There are exciting times ahead for fans of activities. In 4.7 there will be a KRunner plugin for activities, and someone mentioned a new UI for managing activities, but I don’t know what the current plans are.

This is what I would like to see in the future regarding switching activities (in no particular order):

• Make it easier to use D-Bus to switch activity. I couldn’t find a way to switch to the previous/next activity or to bring up the activity manager using D-Bus (update: now I know a workaround way, thanks to a comment below), and when I asked on IRC, I was told that this was already in the plans.
•  The possibility to set a keyboard shortcut for each activity, for example Meta+F1 for the first activity, Meta+F2 for the second one etc. I found a way to do it with D-Bus, but a GUI option would be nice.
• A more streamlined UI for switching activities would be nice. I love how smooth the desktop effects feel, even on this ancient computer – maybe a desktop effect for switching activities?
  One thing I dislike about the current manager is that it gives the impression that you need two clicks to switch activity, one to switch and another one to close the activity manager. If you open the activity manager from the Toolbar → Activities…, it sums up to four click just to switch activity! That’s at least two clicks too much, in my opinion.
• Give activities a more central place in the workspace (like in Plasma Active). Perhaps adding an icon/widget to the default panel to show the activity manager.

Note that this is just my personal wishlist and should not be confused with the actual plans. In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing what the future brings.

Update May 15, 2011: Replaced xte commands with D-Bus calls thanks to ArnAud‘s suggestion. If the D-Bus commands for some reason don’t work for you (those starting with qdbus), you can install xte, which is usually part of a package called xautomation, and use the following commands instead:

• xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key Q' 'keyup Super_L' #open the activity manager
• xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key Tab' 'keyup Super_L' #switch to next activity
• xte 'keydown Super_L' 'keydown Shift_L' 'key Tab' 'keyup Shift_L' 'keyup Super_L' #switch to previous activity

This assumes that you haven’t changed the default global shortcuts, otherwise you have to modify the commands.

Update May 16, 2011: Added a mention of KDE Plasma Workspaces in the beginning and a note about which version this post describes.

Update May 20, 2011: Added a link to the new post about switching to specific activities with keyboard shortcuts.

However, this post isn’t about Userbase – I hope I’ll find some time to summarize the plans for the wiki here in a few days. Today I want to share another tip that I’ve found and need to remember to add to Userbase: Borderless Maximized Windows.

This option is very useful for devices with small screens, such as netbooks, to give slightly more space to your applications. If enabled, the window border will hide automatically when you maximize a window (and vice versa when unmaximized).

If I remember correctly, this feature was introduced in KDE Software Compilation 4.5 for the Plasma Netbook workspace, where it’s enabled by default. Here’s a short screencast demonstration (what, not an animated GIF!?):

Note that I used double click to maximize the windows. This is configurable in System Settings → Window Behavior → Window Behavior → Titlebar Actions.

Previously I used some window-specific settings to get a similar setup, but it only did it according to some pre-defined rules -  the borders weren’t automatically hidden/shown when a window was maximized/restored.

So how do I enable this in Plasma Desktop?

1. Use you favorite text editor to edit the file
   

   ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc

   In some distributions the .kde4 directory is called .kde (or something else like .kdemod4)

2. Add the line
   

   BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true

   under the section [Windows]
   It should look something like this:

   [Windows]
ActiveMouseScreen=true
AltTabStyle=KDE
AutoRaise=false
AutoRaiseInterval=750
BorderSnapZone=10
BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true
CenterSnapZone=0

3. Launch KRunner (Alt+F2) and run the command
   

   kwin --replace

   to restart KWin

4. Go crazy and maximize every window in sight! Remember that you can unmaximize them from the window menu (Alt+F3) or from the task manager in your panel. If quick tiling is enabled (System Settings → Desktop → Screen Edges → Window Management), you can also use Alt+Left mouse button to unmaximize windows by dragging them

Credits this time go to Christian who wrote about this feature in a comment in this blog post. The post also links to a neat widget that’s useful for a setup with borderless windows.

Remaining time in the Battery Monitor

1. Right click on the battery and choose “Battery Monitor Settings”
2. Enable “Show charge information” and click on “OK”
3. Quit plasma-desktop with the command
   

   kquitapp plasma-desktop

4. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc in your favorite text editor (some distributions use other paths, for example ~/.kde/...)
5. Search for the term
   

   showBatteryString=true

   and add the following line directly below it:

   showRemainingTime=true

6. Start plasma-desktop again
   

   plasma-desktop

You may disable “Show charge information” now if you want.

Credits to Sebastian Kügler for posting the instructions on the plasma-devel mailing list. I’ll try to also add them to Userbase when I have some more free time.

Note that I do not want a flame war here about if this should be the default setting/configurable in the GUI – it’s been discussed before, and complaining here won’t make any difference.

Enjoy!

I’ve gathered some tips for new users to get a more familiar desktop, based on frequently asked questions I’ve seen in various places. This is in no way a “10 things you should do” list – it’s up to you to decide which way you like better.

The post is mainly aimed at those who are new to Plasma Desktop, but even experienced users might learn something new.

KDE Plasma Desktop

Just a short note before we begin: the images with a play button are linked to short screencasts – just click to watch them. The screencasts are encoded in GIF and can therefore be played in most web browsers without any additional plugins. The downside is that the quality is quite poor, hope you can bear with it.

Without further ado, here are 10 things you might want to do in KDE SC 4.4:

1. Change the application launcher

The default application launcher in most distributions

Some like it, others don’t – it’s about the default application launcher “Kickoff”. Fortunately, it’s very easy to switch to a more traditional application launcher, similar to the one featured in the KDE 3 series:

Switch to Classic Menu Style

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Right click on the application launcher icon and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”

There is also a more advanced application launcher called Lancelot. This widget, among others, is usually found in a package called kdeplasma-addons. To find out how to add Lancelot to your panel, see section 6. Tweak your panel.

Classic Menu (left) and Lancelot (right)

2. Switch to a traditional desktop with icons

The “traditional desktop” I’m talking about is the type of desktop where you basically have a fullscreen file manager with a nice wallpaper. You can put icons on it, create new folders and files etc.

Traditional Desktop

The default desktop type in Plasma Desktop behaves in a different way. Instead of icons, you put widgets on it – for example icon widgets, or a widget to show the content of a folder (called Folder View). To switch to a traditional desktop, all you need to do is change desktop type:

Switch to traditional desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Click on “Activity”
3. Change “Type” to “Folder View”
4. Click on “Apply” or “OK”

Options for the Folder View desktop type will appear in the Desktop Activity Settings dialog. Note that you can still put widgets on the desktop if you want.

For more information about desktop icons, see this blog post. Although it’s written for KDE SC 4.2, most of the things are the same in 4.4.

3. Choose your wallpaper

While this is similar to how it works in other workspaces, Plasma Desktop offers some extra functionality that are worth mentioning. If you only want to change the wallpaper image:

Change Wallpaper

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Make sure “Type” is set to “Image”
3. Either select a wallpaper in the list, or click on “Open…” to select an image file
4. Click on “OK”

As you probably have guessed, there are other wallpaper types as well. Below is a short description of those shipped with KDE SC 4.4 (some found in kdeplasma-addons):

Color

Paints a solid color or a gradient between two colors on the desktop.

Virus

Viruses that mutate, spread and slowly eat your wallpaper. The better a virus adapts to your wallpaper, the higher is the chance that it’ll survive and pass on its DNA to future generations.

Virus wallpaper

Mandelbrot

Shows a Mandelbrot set fractal on your desktop. You can move the fractal by holding down your left mouse button and drag the Mandelbrot around. Even better, zoom in/out with your mouse wheel or by holding down the middle button (scroll wheel) and move the mouse cursor up or down.

Mandelbrot wallpaper

Note: If your right click menu disappears after changing to this wallpaper type, you can open the Wallpaper dialog by clicking on the toolbox (located in the top-right corner by default) and press “Desktop Activity Settings”. When you’re happy with your Mandelbrot set it’s possible to lock the view (from the wallpaper dialog) to get the mouse actions – such as the right click menu – back.

Weather

Displays different wallpapers depending on the current weather. You can decide which pictures to show for certain weather conditions from the Advanced dialog.

Pattern

Repeated pattern painted on the desktop.

Image

Probably the most commonly used wallpaper type. Pick an image to show as your wallpaper.

Slideshow

Can’t decide which picture you want on your desktop? No problem, with slideshow you can have them all. The images will automatically switch after a set amount of time.

Globe

A globe for your desktop. There are many different map themes to choose among, and you can set the movement to Interactive, Follow the sun, Rotate and Do not move.

Globe wallpaper

4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop

One feature many ask for is the ability to have different wallpapers on different virtual desktops. This is not directly possible in Plasma Desktop – however, you can have different “desktops”, formally known as activities, on each virtual desktop.

You may think of an activity as what you usually call “desktop”. Other than a name, an activity also has a wallpaper, some features (e.g. display icons) and can contain other widgets – namely the ones you put on the desktop.

The name “virtual desktop” is quite confusing, since it’s actually a group of windows. By default you have the same activity – and therefore also the same wallpaper – on all virtual desktops. To enable different activity on each virtual desktop:

Different activity on each desktop

1. Open the application “System Settings”
2. Browse to “Desktop”, “Multiple Desktops”
3. Check the checkbox “Different activity on each desktop”
4. Click on “Apply” and close System Settings

Now you can have not only different wallpapers, but also different widgets on each virtual desktop.

5. Tweak your panel

The panel, often confused with the taskbar (which is a widget that shows your running applications), can be tweaked in many ways. The first two steps are always the same:

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Click on the panel toolbox to the far right, or right click somewhere in the panel and choose “Panel Options”, “Panel Settings”. Note that the latter won’t work everywhere, for example not in the taskbar or system tray

Now you see the panel options. Here are some stuff you can play around with:

Change the height (screencast)

1. Click on the “Height” button and hold down the left mouse button while moving the mouse cursor up or down

Change the width (screencast)

Panel sliders to change the panel width

1. Depending on the panel alignment, you’ll see two or four sliders with arrows. Drag those with the mouse to change the panel width. The arrows pointing out from the panel define the maximum width and the ones pointing inwards the minimum width

Move the panel (screencast)

1. Hold down the left mouse button over “Screen Edge” and drag the panel to the desired screen edge
2. Adjustments can be made with the panel slider pointing at the panel. It’s also possible to change the panel alignment

Add widgets to panel (screencast)

1. Click on “Add widgets…”
2. Drag the desired widgets to the panel or double click to add them

Move widgets (screencast)

1. If you’ve opened the panel toolbox, you can move widgets in the panel with simple drag and drop operations

For more ways to configure your panel, see Plasma HowTo.

In Plasma Desktop, you aren’t limited to one panel – you can add as many panels as you want. However, it’s not possible to change the background and transparency for individual panels – these properties are determined by the workspace theme. If you want to change the appearance for all panels, either change workspace theme or create a custom one. For more information, see the next section 6. Customize the appearance.

6. Customize the appearance

You can change the appearance of many things in Plasma Workspace – everything from icon theme to the look of the window decoration.

Let’s start by launching System Settings and click on “Appearance”. To the left you see a list of modules to configure various parts of the workspace.

Appearance section in System Settings

The names are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll let you play around with the settings yourself. Just a few notes:

• Most modules have a button to download new content, but there are a few exceptions: application styles, window decorations and fonts. The reason the first two don’t have this button is because native styles/window decorations has to be compiled – they’re best installed through your package manager
  • With that said, the Aurorae Theme Engine allows you to download and install SVG-based window decoration themes. Under “Windows”, select “Aurorae Decoration Theme Engine”, click on “Get New Themes…” and download to your heart’s content
• If you want to use the window grouping feature, only some window decorations support it at the moment – for example the default decoration “Oxygen” and “Tabstrip”
• The workspace theme (panels, widget backgrounds etc.) can be change from “Style”, “Workspace”
  • If you want greater control and change the theme for individual workspace components, click on “Overview” in the toolbar and browse to “Advanced” tab, “Desktop Theme Details”

7. Activate/deactivate screen edge actions

Don’t like how windows maximize or tile when you drag them to a screen edge? Or maybe the desktop effect when you hit the top-left corner with your mouse irritates you? No problem – in either case you just need to change an option in System Settings.

Configure active screen edges

1. Launch System Settings
2. Navigate to “Desktop”, “Screen Edges”
3. Click on the different squares in the monitor to set/unset screen edge actions for that location
4. Use the checkboxes under “Window Management” to enable/disable quick tiling of windows
5. The setting at the bottom enables you to switch virtual desktop by moving the mouse cursor to a screen edge
6. When you’re happy with the settings, hit “Apply”

8. Configure mouse actions on the desktop

Two groups of people will be especially happy for this new feature in 4.4:

• Laptop users who sometimes accidentally scroll through virtual desktop when moving the mouse cursor over the desktop
• Persons who want to set a custom menu to pop up when clicking on the desktop

Even if you don’t belong to either group, you might find this option useful.

Customize mouse actions on the desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Choose “Mouse Plugins”

Each action consist of a row with 4-5 items (from left to right):

1. Trigger - Mouse button/wheel to trigger the action. To change the trigger, click on the button. It’ll remain pressed and say “Input here…”. Now, click with a mouse button or scroll in a direction over the button. Note that you can combine this with modifier keys (such as Ctrl)
2. Action list – Choose the desired action from the dropdown list
3. Configure button (not always shown) – Lets you configure the selected action
4. Information button – Shows an About dialog for the action
5. Remove button – Removes the mouse action

To remove an action, simply press the remove key on the same row. At the bottom there’s a button to add new mouse actions.

If you don’t set “Standard Menu” to any mouse trigger, you can still access the Mouse Actions dialog from the toolbox (by default in the top-right corner).

Similar to other settings in this window, the mouse actions are activity-specific. If you have more than one activity, you have to change the mouse actions for all of them – or you could have different mouse actions on different activities (see section 4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop for more information about activities).

9. Configure other settings

You’ll find more KDE software options in – surprise, surprise – System Settings. Here are some favorite modules of mine:

• Look & Feel: Desktop, Desktop Effects – If your hardware supports compositing and you’ve installed the required drivers, it’s possible get various useful (and less useful) desktop effects. In this module you can Suspend/Resume Compositing (Alt-Shift-F12 is faster if you do it regularly), play around with effects and find other relevant options
• Look & Feel: Desktop, Launch Feedback – I don’t like the bouncy icon that appears when you launch applications, so that’s one of the first things I disable in this module
• Look & Feel: Window Behavior, Window Behavior – A lot of options to control how your windows should behave
• Computer Administration: Keyboard & Mouse, Global Keyboard Shortcuts – Configure global keybindings. Change the components with the “KDE component” dropdown list
• Computer Administration: Input Action – More advanced module to set different input actions, such as keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures and window actions
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Autostart – Manage autostart programs and scripts
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Session Manager – If you find that applications not listed in Autostart still start up with Plasma Desktop, it’s probably because you restore the previous session (“A session contains of a collection of applications as well as application-specific information that reflects the state of the applications at the time the session was saved” — Techbase). This module lets you change this behavior under “On Login”. Personally I like the option “Restore Manually saved session”. When this option is selected, the session can be saved from Kickoff (the default application launcher) or the classic menu

If you find it troublesome to navigate back and forth in System Settings, you might prefer the classic tree view style:

Tree View in System Settings

1. Launch System Settings
2. Click on “Configure” in the toolbar (if you’re inside a module, you can’t see this button)
3. Select “Classic Tree View” under “View Style” and click on “OK”

10. Check out online resources

To round off, here are some recommended KDE websites where you can find more interesting things:

• kde.org – The official KDE site where you’ll find announcements,  useful information about various parts of KDE and links to other relevant sites
• userbase.kde.org – Wiki for KDE software users. The screencasts in this post were taken from http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/HowTo/4.4
• forum.kde.org – KDE Community Forums. Here you can get help from other users (including contributors such as KDE developers), post ideas in Brainstorm, have discussions with KDE enthusiasts and much more
• kde-look.org – Get new themes, wallpapers, icons, widgets and other stuff. Or why not share your own creations?
• kde-apps.org – Same as kde-look.org but for KDE applications

I hope you found some of the tips useful; if you think I missed something, just drop a comment below. Feedback in general is also much appreciated!

Note: This isn’t directly related to KDE. However, since there isn’t such a tool for KDE at the moment, I figured some KDE users might find it interesting as well.

I recently bought a new mouse for my desktop computer, more specifically a Logitech Corded Mouse M500. Up until then I had been using an old mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. Now I suddenly have two extra mouse buttons, and a scroll wheel that you can tilt to the left and right. Let’s see how to take advantage of this.

The freewheel scroll feature is pretty nice as well

Bind keys with xbindkeys

As the name suggests, xbindkeys is a small program that lets you bind hotkeys to actions under X. Although it doesn’t include a GUI, it’s very easy to use. There is a graphical configuration tool called xbindkeys-config (GTK frontend), but in this guide I’ll edit the config file directly.

1. First of all you need to install xbindkeys, preferably through your package manager.
2. You can create a default configuration file with the command
   

   xbindkeys --defaults > $HOME/.xbindkeysrc

3. Open ~/.xbindkeysrc in your your favorite text editor. (If you can’t find it, make sure you have “Show hidden files” enabled).
   [This guide aims to be quite comprehensive - if you don't want to read everything, you can look at the default configuration file and try to figure out the rest yourself. It's not difficult if you read the included comments]
4. Let’s check the syntax. Everything after # are comments, which means that the program will ignore them.
   You can find the following text in the default file: 

   # The format of a command line is:
   #    "command to start"
   #       associated key

   Below are also some examples – great. It’s probably a good idea to include a short comment (start the line with #) before each command, for example

   # short comment
       "command to start"
          associated key

5. "command to start" is simply a shell command (that you can run from a terminal). I’ll talk more about it under Actions.
6. associated key is the hotkey. Let’s take a closer look at how to find what we should write here. But before that, don’t forget the last step.
7. Start xbindkeys by running the command in a terminal.

Keyboard shortcuts

This section deals with keyboard shortcuts. If you’re only interested in mouse shortcuts, please see the next section Mouse shortcuts.

The first example in the generated .xbindkeysrc shows how you can define a hotkey:

 control+shift + q

A list of modifiers is included in the comments.

# List of modifier:
#   Release, Control, Shift, Mod1 (Alt), Mod2 (NumLock),
#   Mod3 (CapsLock), Mod4, Mod5 (Scroll).
#
# The release modifier is not a standard X modifier, but you can
# use it if you want to catch release events instead of press events
#
# By defaults, xbindkeys does not pay attention with the modifiers
# NumLock, CapsLock and ScrollLock.

Pretty straightforward, don’t you think? You can also use raw keycodes, as shown in the next example:

c:41 + m:0x4

Now this might look cryptic, but it’s really no problem – you can easily find the keycodes with the --key option. Run

xbindkeys -k

in a terminal and a window pops up. Press the desired hotkey and you should get an output similar to this:

Press combination of keys or/and click under the window.
You can use one of the two lines after "NoCommand"
in $HOME/.xbindkeysrc to bind a key.
"(Scheme function)"
 m:0x15 + c:34
 Control+Shift+Mod2 + q

In this case I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Q. Mod2 corresponds to Numlock which is ignored by default, as explained in the earlier text about modifiers. Apparently the  keycodes for this hotkey are m:0x15 + c:34.

Mouse shortcuts

Now that we know how to deal with keyboard hotkeys, mouse shortcuts should be a piece of cake. The first mouse button (left) is called b:1, the second (right) b:2 and so forth. Take a look at the third example and you’ll see how a mouse shortcut can be defined:

control + b:2

That’s right, you can combine mouse and keyboard shortcuts – great for those who don’t have a fancy mouse with extra buttons. I used to bind Super+ mouse buttons to various actions with my old mouse (Super is the Windows key on most keyboards).

To find out what a mouse button is called, you can use xev. Similar to xbindkeys -k that you used earlier, it pops up a window. However, this one isn’t closed automatically, and it also grabs mouse movement and clicks. Try to click/scroll in the window (without too much mouse movement), and you should see something like

ButtonPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3a00001,
 root 0x189, subw 0x0, time 55432271, (4,0), root:(1102,842),
 state 0x10, button 9, same_screen YES

in the terminal output. According to the last line, I just pressed mouse button 9, which translates to b:9 in .xbindkeysrc.

Actions

command to start is a command that you can run from a terminal, for example an application (dolphin) or a shell script (out of scope for this article).

Let’s take a concrete example. I want to bind wheel tilt -> switch to previous/next desktop. To do this I have to communicate with KWin, the default KDE window manager. KDE applications use D-Bus to communicate with each other, and you can “talk” to them with D-Bus as well. (This is for KDE SC4, in the KDE SC3 series DCOP is used instead).

I’m not very familiar with D-Bus myself, but with the help of the qdbusviewer tool and some Googling I found that I can use the following command to switch desktop:

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.nextDesktop

Find the D-Bus call with qdbusviewer

According to xev (explained in Mouse shortcuts) the tilt to the left and right corresponds to b:6 and  b:7. Therefore, a part of my .xbindkeysrc looks like this:

# Previous desktop
"qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.previousDesktop"
  b:6

# Next desktop
"qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.nextDesktop"
  b:7

Don’t forget the quotation marks ("") around the commands!

Another tool you can use to find D-Bus calls is dbus-monitor, as suggested by Balden in the comments. Run it in a terminal and trigger a command the normal way, for example by hitting a keyboard combination, and dbus-monitor will show the call(s).

Emulate key presses

Now I want to map the two other mouse buttons to the KWin effects “Present Windows” and “Desktop Grid”. I couldn’t find any D-Bus calls for this, so let’s try to achieve it in another way. The effects are already mapped to some keyboard shortcuts – maybe we can find a command to “emulate” these key presses?

The tool for doing this is called xte, and is included in the xautomation package. Again, install it with your package manager.

The default shortcut for “Show Desktop Grid” is Ctrl+F8. The following command should then activate the effect:

xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F8' 'keyup Control_L'

Whether we choose Control_L or Control_R doesn’t really matter. After confirming that it works, I added the following lines to .xbindkeysrc:

# Present Windows
"xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F10' 'keyup Control_L'"
  b:8

# Desktop Grid
"xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F8' 'keyup Control_L'"
  b:9

If nothing happens for you, make sure you emulate the right key presses. Have you changed any shortcuts?

This trick can also be used to map the back/forward buttons on the mouse. Here we can’t use D-Bus, since we want to “talk” to the active window and not a specific application. Fortunately for us, most applications use the key shortcuts Alt+Left and Alt+Right for Back and Forward, respectively. In other words, we can do something like this:

# Back
"xte 'keydown Alt_L' 'key Left' 'keyup Alt_L'"
  b:6

# Forward
"xte 'keydown Alt_L' 'key Right' 'keyup Alt_L'"
  b:7

This’ll work in Dolphin, Konqueror, Firefox, and basically any application that use the same shortcut for Back/Forward.

xte can also be used to simulate mouse clicks, as pointed out by Rahul (see comment for an example).

Want to know more about xte? xte --help displays some helpful text that you might find useful.

Apply settings and make xbindkeys autostart

Now we’re almost done! Remember that you have to restart xbindkeys to apply the changes:

killall xbindkeys && xbindkeys

As a final touch, let’s make xbindkeys autostart with KDE. It’s very easy to do with the new Autostart module.

1. Open System Settings.
2. Go to Advanced tab -> Autostart.
3. Click on “Add Program…”.
4. Write xbindkeys and press OK. A new dialog pops up. Press OK again.
5. Done!

Make xbindkeys autostart

Closing words

In this tutorial we’ve learned how to use the xbindkeys program to bind keyboard and mouse shortcuts to different commands. We also took a quick look at how to communicate with an application using qdbus and emulate key presses with xte. Finally, we made xbindkeys autostart.

I think it would be great if the “Input Actions” module in System Settings also supported mouse shortcuts. A more simple module for assigning mouse buttons to actions would be nice as well.

Hope that you found this guide helpful, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below if there’s anything on your mind.

The end result will look like this:

(but hopefully with less rain…)

As you can see, it’s an hourly forecast. It reports the weather, temperature, wind speed and direction and – most important for me – precipitation.

Enough talk already; here are the steps:

1. Install the Scripted Image plasmoid. It has some quirks (for example, auto reload doesn’t work on one of my computers), but I haven’t found a better alternative.
   The plasmoid is easily installed from the Add Widgets dialog (cashew -> Add Widgets…). Click on “Install New Widgets” and choose “Download New Plasma Widgets”. Search for “image” and press on “Install” in the “Scripted Image” box.

   
   Note: When I close the dialog I get a message stating that the installation failed. However, seeing how the widget appears fine, it seems like it’s just false alarm.

2. Go to yr.no and search for your city. Click on “Hour by hour” and get the URL for the image (in Konqueror: right click -> Actions -> Copy Path -> copy whole path).
   Of course you’re free to use another weather forecast service if you want, as long as it shows the forecast in an image.
3. Add “Scripted Image” to your desktop (cashew -> Add Widgets… -> drag “Scripted Image” to your desktop) and click on “Configure…” in the widget.
4. In the dialog, paste the URL from step 2 under “Image URL”. Choose an appropriate number of minutes (for example 30) for reload “Interval” and set “Scaling” to “Scale applet to content”. Click on “OK”.

We’re done! Hope you find it useful, and as always, comments are much appreciated.

Note: I use the latest development version of KDE4, which means that some things may look slightly different on your computer.

Let’s start with the most simple icon. If you just want a “normal” desktop with icons, see the section “Traditional Desktop”.

Icon Widgets

You’ve probably already discovered the “Add Widgets” dialog, which lets you put all kind of stuff on your desktop: calculators, calenders, sticky notes and clocks, just to name a few. So how do we add an icon widget to the desktop?

There are many ways – a relative straightforward method is to drag and drop. For example, you can drag a file from the file manager Dolphin and drop it on the desktop. If you want a shortcut to an application, simply drag its icon from the application launcher. (Note that this requires your widgets to be unlocked).

Dragging an icon from Kickoff, the default application launcher

The result is an icon that behaves like the other widgets. You’ll notice that the black handle will appear on hover, and you can resize/rotate the icon.

The icon widget behaves like any other widget

Now you might wonder, “Why would anyone want to do that?”. I don’t know. But the fact is that this icon is a widget; for example, if you remove it from the desktop, the original file won’t be deleted. This has several disadvantages, such as not being able to sort icons and align them to grid. So how do we get more “traditional” icons?

Folder View

Folder View is basically a widget that shows the content of a directory. By default, there’s a Folder View on your desktop that displays the files in your desktop directory.

Folder view

You’ll find that Folder View, in contrast to the icon widgets, has the most features one would expect: you select icons, sort and align them to grid, create/delete files etc.

If you have a hard time understanding what the Folder View does, you can think of it as a Dolphin window (the default file manager) without any toolbars.

Folder View – Dolphin’s cousin living on the desktop?

The big difference is that you can’t navigate through directories (folders) in Folder View. Instead, it’ll launch your preferred file manager when you click on a folder.

You can add as many Folder Views as you want from the “Add Widgets” dialog and point them to different locations. In the next section, I’m going to talk briefly about how you can use Folder View.

Usage

First, let’s check the settings: right click -> Folder View Settings or press the wrench on the black border that appears on hover.

Folder View Setting – Location

First of all, you can set the location; i.e., the directory that the Folder View should show. Note that it isn’t restricted to local directories – you can also show files from remote FTP, SSH etc.

In “Display”, you can customize the look of the widget. Not much to say here.

The “Filter” page lets you set which types of items the Folder View should display. The default setting is “Show all files”, but you can choose to show or hide certain files based on their file name and type. For example. I might want to show all image files that begin with “kde” in a directory.

The last page, “Keyboard Shortcut”, doesn’t seem to be very useful at the moment. I think the idea is to set a shortcut to give the widget focus, but keyboard navigation in Folder View doesn’t appear to work very well at the moment.

Now, let’s give two concrete examples of how you can use Folder View.

Example 1. Favorite Applications

You might want to create a Folder View that shows your favorite applications. No problem.

1. Create a new directory somewhere in your home directory (e.g. ~/applications)
2. Add a new Folder View to your desktop and open its settings dialog.
3. In “Location”, click on “Specify a folder:” and enter the location (e.g. ~/applications). You can also click on the button to the right to select directory.
4. Go to “Display”. Change the label to “Applications” and check “Align to grid”.
5. Press OK.

Now you can add applications, for example by drag and drop from the application launcher. When you drop the icon, you’ll probably see a list with different options. “Copy here” should do just fine, since you only copy the .desktop file of the application. “Link here” also works. If you don’t want to see the list, hold down ctrl when you drag the icons.

Example 2. Downloaded PDF files

This main point of this example is to demonstrate the Filter option. Let’s say you want to show all PDF files in your “Download” directory:

1. Add a Folder View widget.
2. Point it to your download directory.
3. You might want to change some display settings, such as setting the label to “Downloaded PDF files”.
4. In “Filter”, choose “Show Files Matching”. Under “File Types:”, type “pdf” in the search bar.
5. Check “PDF Document (*.pdf)” that appears in the list below. Click on OK.

Only show PDF files

Traditional Desktop

So Folder View is great and everything, but what if I don’t want my icons in a box? There are many users that just want a traditional desktop. So they just have to resize a Folder View to cover their entire desktop and use a theme like Naked.

But that would be rather silly, wouldn’t it?

Actually, you can choose to use Folder View as your desktop, and it’s very easy to do:

1. Right click on the desktop -> Appearance Settings (in my version it’s called Desktop Settings, but I think KDE 4.2 uses the former name).
2. Under “Desktop Activity”, you can see “Type: Desktop”. Change “Desktop” to “Folder View” and click on OK.

Choosing Folder View as desktop type

You should now have a traditional desktop. Huzzah! To revert to the default desktop, right click -> Folder View Settings and change “Type” to “Desktop”. You’ll also find the Folder View settings in this dialog.

Tips

I hope that you found this somewhat helpful. To round things off, here are some tips:

• You can still add widgets to the traditional desktop. Click on the cashew and choose “Add widgets…”.
• Like any other widget, you can add Folder View to a panel.
• If you like the tip above, check out QuickAccess, “a small applet designed for the panel to have quick access to the most used folders”. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with KDE 4.2 yet.

Have fun!

Before

This is a small guide on how to get rid of the cashews. You probably need version 4.1 of KDE or higher and know a little bit about how to use the terminal.

Panel Cashew

The cashew here let’s you configure the panel by clicking on. If you feel that you’re satisfied with your setup and don’t need the cashew anymore, you can hide it be choosing “Lock Widgets”. This option can be found in many places, such as the right click menu, when you configure the panel or by clicking on the cashew in the upper right corner.

See, I’m not completely useless

Once you’ve locked your widgets, they can’t be moved, resized/rotated or removed anymore. The option to add new widgets will also be gone. If you want to change anything, simply unlock the widgets in the same way as you locked them.

Desktop Cashew

This one is a little bit tougher. You’ll notice that it won’t go away when you lock the widgets, which has caused frustration among many KDE4 users. One particular person decided to do something about it, and thus the I HATE the Cashew plasmoid was born.

Note: The preferable way to install this widget is through your package manager if it’s in the repositories. The steps below describe how to compile it from source.

1. Download the plasmoid here and save it somewhere in your home directory.
2. Extract the tbz file with the following command:

tar -xjvf filename


where filename is the name of the downloaded file, for example 91009-iHateTheCashew.tbz.



3. Run the following commands:

cd iHateTheCashew


mkdir build

cd build

4. Now we’re ready to compile the plasmoid:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` ..


make

If you run into errors in this step, it’s most likely a dependency problem. Check that you have all necessary packages installed.

5. In most cases, you need root access to install the widget:

sudo make install

When you’ve typed your password and hit Enter, the plasmoid will be installed – you should now be ready for step 6. Below are some corner cases.

If the sudo command isn’t available, you can use the regular su command:

su
<type root password>
make install

Sometimes your user has write access to the directory where KDE4 is installed, for example if you have a KDE development environment set up according to this Techbase Tutorial. In that case, you can run make install without using sudo or su.

If you use the .bashrc in the link above, you can compile and install the plasmoid with a single command:

cmakekde ..

6. You should find your new plasmoid in the Add Widgets dialog. Add I HATE the cashew to your desktop (remember that you have to unlock the widgets first).

And we’re done! Lock your widgets again and all cashews should have disappeared.

After

If you want back on your desktop, simply remove the I HATE the cashew plasmoid by clicking on in the Add Widgets dialog. Nice, isn’t it?