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Title is a bit non-descriptive, but that's the easiest way to describe it in confined space.

Preface
In KDE4.3 there will be an option to link activities to desktop, which I feel is a really good thing, but I have came to conclusion that sometimes that's not what I want so I came up with this idea.

Idea:
Now we have activities and desktops completely separated, but as I said in KDE4.3 you will be able to link them. While the linked option is good most of the time for some extensive work I found out that having same activity on all desktops is a useful thing.
Currently I have 4 desktops and 3 activities.
I'll do a "quick mock-up" to illustrate my idea:

Currently my plasma desktop looks like this:
4 desktops: | 3 activities:
1 2 3 4 | main, study, multimedia

If I were to link them my plasma desktop would look like this:
Desktops: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Activities: main|study|multimedia|other

But when I do something for study I came to conclusion that I would prefer that study activity would be "unfolded" over all virtual desktops not only 2.
You would achieve this with a new "pager" plasmoid that would include both desktops and activities in similar fashion to what I described in last example.
But if you were to use an U+left click on name of activity that activity would unfold on all of your virtual desktops. You would be able to fold it back on it's assigned desktop with F+left click.
So it would look like this:
Desktops: 1 2 3 4 ---> U+left-click--->
Activities: main study multimedia other
-->
Desktops: 1 2 3 4 ---> F+left-click--->
Activities: study
--->
Desktops: 1 2 3 4
Activities: main study multimedia other

I would do a proper mock-up but my Kolour paint keeps crashing.
Hope you get the point. If not I'll try to get my Kolour paint to work properly.

I was giving some thought to this idea and I think I know the theoretical part of making this happen.
In KDE4.3 we'll have an option to link activities to desktops with this:

Code: Select all

perVirtualDesktopViews=true

So this is the stance while activities are all folded to their designated desktops.
But when you decide to unfold them this would change to:

Code: Select all

perVirtualDesktopViews=false

So it's just a matter of making a plasmoid that would have functions of both pager and activity bar.
And if you were to click on activity the plasmoid would edit your plasma-desktoprc from

Code: Select all

perVirtualDesktopViews=true

to

Code: Select all

perVirtualDesktopViews=false

in my opinion there is already to much confusion.. i would rather drop the whole activity concept..

choose how many desktops you want and at the same config-dialog should be a checkbox "configure every desktop separately" that would be all - not confusing - simple and functional..