Well, so there was no response and I had to find at least partial solution myself.
So here is my advice to bring Activities at least partially to life (might be used as a complex settings or standalone tips):
Set desktops quantity to 1. It's not necessary, but with following settings each
activity will have it's own desktop, so they practically multiply.
Place a Activity Preview
widget into your toolbar. Also, this is not necessary,
but if you're going to use Activities heavily, the WIN-TAB
shortcut with following
clicking is quite awkward. With the Activity Preview
widget, you can switch
Activity with 1 click.
Set the activities (i.e. WIN-TAB
, click the options button at the top):
a. Set required number of "fixed" Activities, perhaps with appropriate icons.
Activities can be also project or
task related, but I'm concerned about the long term Activities, that share
their workflow. To give you an idea, I set:
* General (for all common tasks without specific workflow)
* Admin - for administration - with YaST, KDE system settings, SuperUser
Dolphin, Kate, KInfo, nVidia shortcuts
* Graphics - to work mostly with GIMP and InkScape
* CAD - for 2D and 3D CAD work - LibreCAD and FreeCAD shortcuts
* Devel - for programming
* Web - for web development (shortcut to start Jekyll, shortcut to emulated
web, etc.
* Writing - to work with Focus Writer, dictionary, ...
b. On the 2nd tab called "Switching" check the checkbox "Remember the current
virtual desktop for each activity (needs restart)
". Now I'm not sure if this
option is still required, when you set your desktop count to 1, but it doesn't
do any harm anyway.
I created a directory for Activities in my custom local Sys folder
(~/Sys/Activities
) and
for each activity with standalone shortcut list another sub-directory, i.e. Admin,
Graphics, CAD,... I then opened the directories one by one and dragged there
shortcuts from the launcher in my panel and renamed them to more reasonable names
(i.e. "org.kde.cervisia.desktop
" to "Cervisia
").
For EACH activity desktop, I threw into the desktop one or two widgets called
Folder View
and set them this way:
a. If I used only one, I would set the Folder View
widget to point to a working
directory of the activity, i.e. ~/Writing
, where I have both the
application shortcuts and the files. That is good for simple activities, such
as the writing.
b. First of standalone Folder View
is set to the particular folder created in
4th step. This way you see shortcuts for the Activity you have selected.
c. Second of standalone widgets on the desktop is one to show files and folders
related to the activity, i.e. ~/Coding
for Devel Activity or~/Graphics
for
Graphics Activity. Organise a special directory and help yourself with
Symlinks
, if you have the work directories scattered over more places, such
as local and network.
For some applications you may set special behaviour on starting, let's say that you
might want GIMP to always start in Graphics Activity only. Then start GIMP, right
click the title bar, choose Other Tasks
and then Special window settings
and
in the Size and location
tab, check the Activity
checkbox and select Initial
status
from the next combobox. But be careful not to set it to apps, that you
expect to use across activities, such as Dolphin or Konsole. However, the settings
above allows you to change the activities after you start the application, so you
can switch activity or add it to more activities (right-click app title bar and
select activities in local menu)
You should set the working directory mentioned before as Activities related
directory. Find the directory in Dolphin, select it's content, right-click it
and select Activities
and add it to current Activity or select one (or more) from the list. That is
required for following point
There's a way to set at least partially the task bar to reflect Activities. I use
for it a large side bar popping out of right edge of screen (whilst the main task
bar is at the classic bottom edge position. I have on this task bar some widgets
like clock and calendar and you can also add another Folder View
here, this time
set it to Show files related to active Activity
. Now, if you have set your files
and application shortcuts in appropriate working directories to particular
activities, the content of this widget will dynamically change according to the
selected activities.
There's a widget called Kargos, which I believe might be used to script stuff and
possibly it may by able to show Activity-related content. I didn't try it to set
up, so I can't help more.
This took me little bit of work to adjust, but it works reasonably for the activities I need. A factor is, that I have a large 4K screen and thus the Folder View
widgets with app shortcuts are usually not covered, since I don't use most of my apps in full-screen mode. It might be an issue for a smaller screens.
I'd be pleased if you follow up this post with comments or answers that would help out to squeeze more good out of (currently quite crippled) activities.