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 post was accidentally moved, click here to read it »

Sorry about the trouble. ☹

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.

Back then I often explained activities as ‘similar to virtual desktops, which are groups of windows, but instead activities are groups of desktop widgets’. However, in 4.6 they have evolved past this stage – now windows are also associated with activities. Therefore I wanted to write a blog post about the current state of activities, but someone beat me to it. A few days ago Jason Lim Yuen Hoe posted a very nice article on activities which brought up most of the points I planned to talk about. I found that the post reflected my own thoughts very well, and if you haven’t read it yet, I recommend giving it a read.

In this post I’ll instead write about my personal vision of how I hope activities will change my workflow. It’s based on my own experience and what I’ve read about activities. Note that it doesn’t necessarily coincide with the vision of the Plasma team, but if there are any inconsistencies I would appreciate if a Plasma developer could point them out in a comment below.

After reading this I hope that you will get a better understanding of what activities are and start to think about how you can benefit from them. I will also try to answer the frequently asked question “Why should I use activities instead of virtual desktops?” and explain when I think you should use what.

Translations: Portuguese | Russian

How can activities be useful?

Let’s start from the very beginning and ask ourselves “Why do we need activities?”. Many are already familiar with the concept of virtual desktops and use them in a similar way to activities, which makes things more complicated. For that reason I will take the easy route here and assume that virtual desktops don’t exist. While reading you might start to think “Hey! That’s what virtual desktops are for!”, but try to ignore it – I’ll come back to them later.

So for the sake of understanding, let’s forget about virtual desktops for now. Poof. Gone.

Remember this guy? Well, you shouldn’t by now

The problem

Most of us use our computers for several different tasks, such as playing games, writing reports, creating graphics and web development. I’m sure you can think of more examples.

For some of the tasks you only need one application. If you want to play a game you start the game and play until you decide to do something else, at which point you close the game. It’s as simple as that.

In the case when one task equals one window it’s easy to keep things organized – when you want to switch task you just need to switch to the right window in the taskbar or start a new application. However, most of us have tasks that require more than one application, and then things start to get messy. In that case we want to use the taskbar to switch between windows for the current task, but it will also show windows that we aren’t interested in at the moment. An example of this is shown in the screenshot below. I started out by working on a report, but after a while I decided to take a break and code a bit on a spreadsheet application. This is only two tasks, but you can see how quickly the taskbar becomes a mess.

Screenshot showing a somewhat cluttered workspace (I’ve seen worse)

So why don’t we just close all unused windows? That’s indeed what many people do, but it requires you to manually close and open applications every time you want to switch task. In addition to that, you have to open the files you want to work with and sometimes rearrange the new windows. This makes switching between tasks time consuming and cumbersome.

A quick word about session management

Some applications support sessions, which is great. Sessions allow you to save a particular state of an application and restore it later. For example, I can open all my source code files in Kate and save it as a session. When I feel like coding again I just need to launch Kate, open my “coding” session and voilà – the application state is as I left it the last time, with all my files open.

KDE Workspaces have supported sessions for a long time, but it has always been on a very basic level. By default it restores the previous session (i.e. the state of your workspace last time you logged out), but you can also set it to restore a manually saved session. It is however limited to one session (Bug 62157), so you can’t have one session for coding, one for editing videos etc.

How activities can change the workflow

Traditionally we start applications and switch between them with the taskbar. As said, this works well if we only have one window per task.

For tasks that require more than one application, instead of starting each application individually we rather want to start a new “session”. One click and everything is set up – the applications are started with the right files open, windows are ordered in the way we prefer and everything belonging to other tasks get out of the way. Switching task should be a simple matter of switching “session”.

Feeling like coding for a bit? Just start the Coding “session”

Yes, what I’m describing is how I hope activities in KDE Plasma Workspaces will work. But what if the applications in your activity vary a lot – for example, you don’t know in beforehand which game you want to play in your Gaming activity. In this case we don’t want to restore any windows.

The thing is, the concept of activities is not limited to windows, it involves your whole workspace. When switching to your Gaming activity you might not want to restore any applications, but you can set your desktop to show shortcuts to your favorite games. Your application launcher will be populated with gaming-related software and your contact list will show your gaming buddies first etc.

How a gaming activity could look like with shortcuts to 13(!) games

In short, activities make it easier to resume your task and to focus on it. It’s not a way to organize windows – if you find yourself switching between two windows frequently, they probably belong to the same activity, or you’re not concentrating on your current task. Furthermore, with activities it’s effortless to switch between different tasks. You only need to set up an activity once, when you start it later the previous state will be restored and you can start working right away.

Activities versus virtual desktops

I hope I’ve convinced most of you why we need something like activities. The next question is then naturally “We already have virtual desktops, what additional benefits do activities provide?”.

Earlier I talked about the problem with how quickly your workspace gets cluttered when you do several tasks that require many windows. There have been different attempts to solve this, for example by grouping tasks in the taskbar. Virtual desktops allow you to organize your windows in a certain way and only show the group of windows you’re interested in. At first it might sound a lot like what activities do, but I personally think that they are fundamentally different.

First of all, I see virtual desktops as a way to organize windows and nothing more. It’s a nice feature when you have many windows to work with. Activities, on the other hand, is more like a session manager. Not only can you save and restore states of your workspace (this is already possible to some degree with virtual desktops and the current session manager in KDE Workspaces), you can also stop activities if you find that they take too much computer resources.

Stop resource-intensive activities that you don’t need at the moment

I’ve never quite managed to use virtual desktops to divide my tasks, although I know that some people do it. To continue with my example of writing a report and coding – sure, I could move all windows related to coding to a separate virtual desktop. But what about my music player? I want to listen to music when I’m working on my report and when I’m coding, so which virtual desktop does it belong to? I usually find myself putting it on a separate virtual desktop.

With activities you can associate a particular window with more than one activity. You should have everything you need for a certain task in an activity, which eliminates the need to switch back and forth between activities (unless you really want to switch task). In the example with the music player I would associate it with both my coding and my report writing activity.

There are other limitations of virtual desktops that make it clear that they were created for a different reason than activities. In earlier versions of Plasma Workspaces you had a fixed number of virtual desktops that you could change, but in recent versions it is possible to add and remove virtual desktops “on the fly”. What happens is that the number of virtual desktops is increased or decreased by 1. This may not sound that bad, until you realize that it always removes the last virtual desktop. It’s probably possible to hack around this, but as far as I understand it’s not that trivial.

Finally, as I said before, activities are not only about windows. In 4.6 only your desktop and windows are affected by switching activity, but in future versions more applications will be activity aware. Such applications can be customized to prioritize showing information that are relevant for your current activity. Here are some ideas of what it could be:

• Favorites in the application launcher
• Entries in the Places sidebar in Dolphin and open/save dialogs
• File search results (showing relevant files/folders first)
• Bookmarks in your web browser
• Contact list in Kopete
• News feeds in Akregator

Are activities unintuitive?

Some people claim that activities are unintuitive and hard to understand. I agree to a certain degree since activities are under heavy development, but I believe that the concept (at least the one described here) is generally easier to understand than virtual desktops.

I’ve seen many new Linux users (using “Linux” as a very broad term here) point and ask what those two/four squares in the panel are. Someone will answer that those are virtual desktops, which further confuses the new users. What are virtual desktops? Even after an explanation most users I’ve observed don’t seem to understand what to use virtual desktops for.

Desktop effects such as the famous cube and desktop grid help a lot, since they make it easier to visualize what virtual desktops are and what happens to your windows when you switch desktop.

If someone asks me what an activity is, I want to be able to have the following conversation:

Me: “So, what activity are you doing at the moment?”
Guy: “I’m analyzing data for a study.”
Me: “So, this is your ‘Analyzing data’ activity. [Explains how to rename an activity.] When you want to do something else, don’t close anything – you can leave it as it is. Just switch to a new activity.”
Guy: “So now I’ve created a new activity and started to write on my report. Is this my ‘Writing report’ activity?”
Me: “That’s right.”
Guy: “Geez, I’m out of ideas on what to write, maybe I should do some more analyzing. Now where did I put that file…”
Me: “No need to search, just switch back to your analyzing data activity!”
Guy:

So are virtual desktops redundant now?

I don’t think so. There will be people who want to organize the windows within a single activity, and this is what virtual desktops should be used for.

I’m on the same track as Jason (the author of the article I linked to in the beginning) here – if you use virtual desktops to separate windows for different tasks, you might want to switch to activities in the future with only one virtual desktop. However, if you want to group certain windows in a single activity, you can use virtual desktops. Finally, if you only do one task on your computer one activity might be enough, and virtual desktops can be used to organize your windows.

There is an option to associate activities with virtual desktops (it’s still called “Different widgets for each desktop” in 4.6). Personally I think it just makes things more confusing by merging the two concepts – the only benefit I see now is that it makes it easier to switch activity and move windows between activities by using methods intended for controlling virtual desktops. As activities mature further I hope that this option becomes unnecessary.

Closing words

In this post I’ve talked about my interpretation of activities and how I wish to use them. I want to remind you that what I’ve written here is not official, it’s my personal vision. It is, however, based on the current state of activities and what I’ve read about them, so hopefully the description here isn’t too far from what will become reality.

I’m still experimenting with activities, but I think they need to mature a bit before I can completely change to the new workflow described here. Having said that, I like what I see in 4.6 and I’m excited to discover the state of activities in 4.7.

I sometimes hear people complain that it’s too hard to change activity, so in my next article I plan to write about the methods I know to switch between them. Meanwhile, have fun with your activities, I hope this post has been useful to you.