The KDevelop forum was the first to join. Here you can receive help for using the powerful KDevelop IDE, as well as help the developers, for example by sharing your screenshots.

The Kexi developers have been very active in the new Kexi forum, asking for user’s wishes and sorting out problems in the General Help subforum.

Soon Dolphin, the default KDE file manager, also got its own Dolphin forum. Before topics about Dolphin would be shattered around in the Other KDE Software and Workspace forums. We realized that the new Dolphin forum didn’t really fit in any of our existing categories, so the System & Utilities category was created.

Marble is the first application from the KDE Educational Project to join the forums, visit the Marble forum to take a look. Don’t forget hat you still can ask questions about the other KDE EDU applications in the Games & Education parent forum.

KDE Workspace Vision is a special kind of forum where users can discuss what they would like to see in their future workspace, see Dario’s post for more information. It differs from Brainstorm as you’re allowed to post and discuss complete visions, while only single concrete ideas are accepted in Brainstorm.

Finally, we have our newest addition, the Konsole forum. Like Dolphin, topics about Konsole used to be posted to different places in the forum. Now most of them have been moved to their new home.

Meanwhile, the KWin developers implemented a feature in KWin to get useful information for users to post when asking for support. It’s really great to see developers care about helping their users. Martin also proposed a GSoC idea about supporting users directly from the desktop (with a plasmoid), using forum.kde.org. Unfortunately it’s too late to apply, but who knows, maybe someone already did? If it’s not taken and you’re interested in given it a try, you should definitely contact Martin or one of the forum admins (forum-admin@kde.org).

To close up – if you’re a user of any of those applications, the forums provide an easy way to connect with the community and receive expert help from other users and developers. If you’re a developer and want your own forum for your application, you’re just a few click away!

In this post I’ll talk about why you, a developer or contributor, should consider to create a forum at the KDE Community Forums for your KDE application or project.

Some of the advantages of forum.kde.org

Most users seem to prefer forums over mailing lists. Let’s just leave it at that and not get into a debate why one or the other is better. Instead, the focus will be on the KDE Community Forums and why you should get a forum there instead of, say, starting your own:

• Everything KDE-related in one place, users don’t need to register at multiple forums.
• As if that wasn’t enough, forum.kde.org supports login using KDE identity. One KDE account to rule them all!
• The board, which runs on phpBB, has many useful features such as guided posting, marking topics as solved, tagging system, advanced search powered by Sphinx etc. Oh, and did I mention that it looks great?
• We have a very dedicated team consisting of friendly and knowledgeable persons who maintain the forums, help users, moderate posts, make sure the board version is up-to-date and much more.
• Spam is a real problem for many forums. We have a sophisticated system to deal with spambots, even those who try to disguise themselves as normal users, and an active team that cleans the forum from spam regularly.
• It’s easy to reach the forum team in case you have any problems or questions (or if you just want to talk to us ).

To summarize, joining forum.kde.org means less job for you and more benefits for your users.

Convinced already? Take a look at our community page for information about how to request a new forum. I’ll repeat this information below, but first, I want to share some success stories.

Successful forums

KDE Community Forums already has several forums where developers are actively participating in the discussions and helping users. Some examples that come to mind include Eigen, KMyMoney, KWin, Skrooge and Tellico. There are two forums I want to mention in particular.

Krita

The Krita forum is a perfect example of an active community. I believe the Krita developers are a big part of the success – they regularly visit the forum, ask for user feedback, let artists contribute in the form of e.g splash screens and are just responsive and friendly in general.

There was one feature the Krita guys wanted that the forum didn’t provide out-of-box, a gallery for users to share their artwork. Sure enough, a phpBB mod was soon written by our awesome staff to display thumbnails for topics.

Krita gallery

I highly recommend that you take a look, there are a lot of impressive work in the gallery, all created with Krita.

If you have any special requests for your forum, don’t hesitate to discuss it with the forum team. We can’t promise anything but it’s possible that something can be done.

Amarok

Amarok had an active forum a long time before the official KDE Community Forums was launched. However, the Amarok developers saw the benefits of having everything unified under one roof and decided to migrate their forum to forum.kde.org. This was no easy task, all users had to be moved to the new forum (with possible name collisions) along with the posts. The difference in forum software didn’t exactly help.

But still, it could be done. Our competent staff wrote a conversion script that moved user information, posts etc. from one database to the other and the result can be seen at the current Amarok forum.

So if you already have a forum and want to migrate to forum.kde.org, ask one of the forum administrators.

How to request a new forum

You can find all information on our new community.kde.org page, I’m just repeating it here for your convenience.

If you want a forum for your application or project, there are only three conditions it has to meet:

1. The application or project should be related to KDE
2. There should be enough interest to fill the forum
3. At least one person involved with the application or project must be willing to moderate the forum

Note that your application doesn’t have to be part of the KDE Software Compilation.

The next step is to file a request at http://bugs.kde.org for the “forum.kde.org” product, here’s a link for the lazy. It should contain the following information:

• Name of the new forum and a short description
• User names of the people who are willing to moderate
• (Optional) If you have any special requests

When in doubt, just ask and we’ll work it out together.

I hope to see more developers join the KDE Community Forums and maybe even a few new forums in the near future. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section below.

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!

Hello everyone!

Netrunner (http://www.netrunner-os.com) aims to become one of the leading KDE-centric Linux distributions, and to achieve this we need your help! Thanks to the financial support of Blue Systems we have the opportunity to hire one developer experienced in KDE/Qt/C++ programming to improve some areas of KDE software. You’ll be able to work full-time on various KDE-projects, such as

• Improving Kmenu, the panel and other parts of Plasma Desktop
• Fixing various bugs
• Improving/adding functionality

The improvements will be pushed upstream to make them available for all KDE users.

We guarantee monthly payment depending on your skills and experience with regards to KDE.

If you are interested in taking the offer, please send me an email with your CV to:

starbuck[AT]netrunner-os.com

Thanks and “Happy Holiday Season”!

This is a story about how I got what I wanted through toil, sweat and tears (thankfully no blood was spilled; the sweat and tears part might also be slightly exaggerated). All thanks to the nature of Free and Open Source Software.

Like many other times, it all started with a harmless thought: “So many things to do, I think I need a ToDo list”. Before I would keep track of things to do in a Notes widget on my desktop (screenshot), but this felt a bit primitive. It was time to get something better, although still simple, as I only needed the most basic features:

• A clear list of tasks that need to be done and when they must be accomplished
• Easy way of adding new tasks and marking tasks as completed
• Possibility to create tasks that are repeated (e.g. a task that needs to be done once every day)
• Basic priority settings

with the last point being a “nice to have” rather than “must”. With this in mind, I set out on my journey to find a suitable ToDo widget for my desktop.

… And returned empty-handed. Despite the many widgets that are shipped by default, the even larger amount of widgets on KDE-apps (not to mention the vast amount of Dashboard/Web/SuperKaramba/Google Gadget widgets), I couldn’t find one that fulfilled my requirements – a ToDo list that looks good on the desktop and supports the features listed above. Was that too much to ask for?

One of the top candidates was Remember The Milk, a plasmoid written by Andrew Stromme, which is included in kdeplasma-addons and thus often installed by default. I created an account on the Remember The Milk site and played around with the widget for a bit. It supported all the features I asked for and much more – great! The way of adding new tasks was also very nice. For example, I can write “Clean room tomorrow”, and it understands  that I want the task “Clean room” scheduled for tomorrow (actually, it’s much smarter than that).  However, I’m a person who likes minimalism, the KISS principle and clean desktops, and unfortunately Remember The Milk made my desktop feel too cluttered for my tastes (a problem shared by many widgets, by the way).

Remember The Milk plasmoid on my desktop

That could’ve been the end of story, but there’s a reason for the alternative title of this post. For more than a decade I’ve been enjoying Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as a user. I liked the freedom that the KDE workspaces and applications offered, the freedom to use them and make them work as I wanted, but over time I’ve come to more and more appreciate the philosophy behind FOSS and the great communities around many FOSS projects such as KDE.

I’ve been in a developer’s shoes a few times, but all I’ve done is small changes. Today I put on those shoes again and got to experience what freedom means from a programmer’s perspective.

The Remember The Milk plasmoid is licensed under a FOSS license which, as you probably already know, means that anyone can view and edit the source code. Using the nice web interface at projects.kde.org, I could easily locate the relevant repository and find the Git command to clone it. The first thing I wanted to do was to declutter the widget by removing things I didn’t need. The label that displays the text at the top was the first to go, closely followed by the tab bar and filter bar. Since I didn’t want to spend too much time on this, it was done in a very quick and dirty way – I haven’t removed the code for filtering the tasks even though the filter bar is gone, for example. This method didn’t require much understanding of the code, and anyone with a little C++ knowledge could have easily done it. But yes, it’s not a very elegant solution.

Before compiling the source to see my modifications I had to edit CMakeLists.txt. The file contains instructions to CMake on how to make the project, and I didn’t want to overwrite my current Remember The Milk plasmoid. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, I highly recommend you to take a look at how other widgets (e.g. from KDE-apps.org) do it, as well as checking the Techbase page. It’s not that hard to figure it out after seeing some examples.

The next thing to do was to improve the appearance. This seemed harder, as I’m not used to working with QPainter et al. But the code was written in such as a way that it was easy to find the things I wanted to change, and with some help from API references (especially for Qt and Plasma), I got a result that I was happy with.

Remember The Milk after modifications

There was still one thing that I wasn’t satisfied with, however. To mark a task as complete, you had to enter edit mode by clicking on the task, check the Complete checkbox, and finally click on Update Task. I wanted an easier and faster way. Driven by my recent success, I felt that it was worth to give it a try.

My first idea was to add a button next to each task, but this seemed to require quite much work. Instead I went for an easier solution – middle click on tasks to mark them as complete. It was surprisingly easy to implement since I could copy the code for updating tasks. The hard part was to figure out how to detect which mouse button was clicked, which was easily solved with a Google search. The only problem is that with my current implementation, I had to change the action from “clicked” to “pressed”, meaning that I broke drag and drop in the process. But to me, the new feature is more important.

What really hit me during all this was how much control I had over my workspace – it truly is my workspace. If I can’t configure something to work as I want, I’m always free to modify the source code. Of course, I’ve known that this was possible ever since I was introduced to FOSS, but it’s different to experience it first-hand. Even I can do it.

And so can you! If you’re interested in contributing code to KDE, I have three suggestions:

• If you feel unsure, pick something that doesn’t seem too hard to achieve, for example doing small fixes like what I’ve done with Remember The Milk (although in my case, it’s not supposed to be an improvement; it’s rather an adaption to what I personally want)
• There’s much information on the net, but if you can’t find an answer, don’t be afraid to ask. You can do this via IRC channels, mailing lists, forums etc.
• Most importantly, work on something that you want. Is there a small bug that you find slightly annoying? Try to fix it! A simple application that you miss? You can create it!

I call this new plasmoid Remember The Milk Simple because I’ve stripped out some features, and the intention of the widget is to provide a simple ToDo list for the desktop. I guess you could call it a fork of the original Remember The Milk plasmoid. Before anyone asks, I want to clarify that I’m not intending to release the widget as it is now. The reason is simple – I consider this a hack, and a very ugly one at that. If there is interest I might work a bit more on it but I doubt I’ll find the time.

“But what about all this FOSS stuff you just babbled about”, you might wonder. Fair enough. If you really want this widget or are interested in contributing, e.g. by cleaning up the code, you can check out (or rather, clone) the Git repo for this project:

I understand that this widget is an unfinished project, take me to Gitorious »

To use it you’ll also need the Remember The Milk dataengine which is included in kdeplasma-addons.

That’s the end of my story, I hope it’ll inspire some to roll up their sleeves and start hacking. In the end I got (what I consider) a nice-looking ToDo list on my desktop, which will be an excellent complement to a widget I created called Procrastinate No More. Now I just need to actually start working on some tasks instead of hacking on widgets that remind me to do it.

• Whenever UserBase is mentioned the first time in a new context, call it “UserBase Wiki” or “KDE UserBase Wiki” if the context doesn’t make it clear that it’s KDE-related. The reason for this is that many people have mentioned that they didn’t know what a “userbase” was, and that they weren’t aware that UserBase actually is a wiki anyone can edit.
• Give UserBase its own unique logo.

I had made a rough logo based on the idea “Connect the pieces” and intended to simply replace the KDE icon in the sidebar, but Claus and Anne saw another mockup I had made (for a completely different purpose) and thought it would look good with some text as well. Brilliant idea, strangely enough I hadn’t even thought about it – isn’t it wonderful to work with other people? During the sprint we set on “Share your Knowledge” and asked our logo creator Eugene to make a logo for us. Here’s the result:

Of course you should just head over to UserBase directly and see it in action. If you still see the old KDE logo you might have to refresh your cache, Shift + F5 in most browsers.

Finally, a reminder:

UserBase is a wiki for KDE users, made by KDE users. Registration is no longer necessary to contribute. Share your Knowledge »

Today was another warm and sunny day at Linuxhotel in Essen, where the first KDE WebWorld sprint was held, but the increasing cloudiness and predicted rain in the afternoon meant that it was time to pack and go home. A lot of things have happened during these days, so here’s a summary (because Ingo forced me to do one):

• Evil Toma is evil, but also a great teammate when it comes to Tischfußball.
• Eugene Trounev cooked very tasty meals despite the lack of polar bear meat in Essen.
• Ingo Malchow is a pretty good pilot, but needs to work on the landings a bit. My advice: stay away from house roofs and trees.
• Stuart Jarvis also likes animated GIFs; maybe it’s about time we put some on the kde.org site?
• Matthias Meßmer is (a) pipesmoker.
• Niklas Laxström has a time machine so that he can listen to our future complaints and fix them the day before in his comfortable couch.
• Anne Wilson doesn’t only work on the UserBase Wiki between meals, she probably also does it after going to bed and before waking up.
• Claus Christensen could have been my favorite teacher in high school if only he lived in the same area as I did (hooray for math and physics). Just imagine if you had a teacher who contributed to KDE, wouldn’t that be cool? Based on the data I have teachers seem to be pretty common at WebWorld sprints.

All in all I had a great time, it was very fun to meet everyone and talk about everything (although at some nights it got pretty late). There were still a few topics I wanted to discuss, but time is limited,  we had many other important discussions and overall I think that the sprint has been very productive for the KDE Web Team.

In this post I’ll write about what the KDE UserBase Wiki team has worked on during the first day – and it’s quite much in just one day! The wiki has always had much potential in my opinion, but unfortunately not too many contributors. We want to change that.

• Everyone is a potential contributor. To lower the entry barrier further, we now allow non-registered users to edit pages. This is great news for those who just want to make spontaneous contributions. However, registering has many benefits and is still recommended.
• Everyone can contribute. We have made small changes to the sidebar and the pages for contributors to make it clearer. Hopefully this will make it easier for new contributors to get started.
• Details are important as well. It is awesome to have all these different people gathered here in the same place (and what a wonderful place it is). This has allowed us to quickly fix a bunch of small and some larger issues with UserBase. Those are issues the user shouldn’t experience in the first place so I won’t go into any details, let’s just say that it has improved the user experience of the wiki. There has also been improvements in the translation tools, small tweaks in the style and other nice stuff.

In the evening there were discussions about how to strengthen the UserBase image, and we have some exciting plans. The details will be worked out over the next few days.

Before I end this post, here’s a challenge for you:

Make a contribution to UserBase » It could be an application feature that you think more people should know about, a small tip, an updated screenshot, a typo fix – you get the idea, every contribution counts!

And remember, you don’t even need to be registered anymore, just click on to edit a page. If you feel unsure, the Sandbox can be used to experiment. You can use the Discussion page on the start page (second button from the left) to ask for help or try to ask in the #kde-www channel on freenode.

How many managed to read this far and clear the challenge? If you did, why don’t you write a comment below?

• 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.