Activities are nice but....we need social activity sharing.

1) Make activity switching fast: Activity switching is currently designed to impress a 12 year old boy (see the pretty colors)... and it's slow. The desktop context menu (right click) option to switch activities is fast. It uses names, not icons. It doesn't require you to hit a small target in the lower left of the screen. It doesn't take a bunch of time to pop up a huge oversized widget display. Use activity names to make it fast.

Cycle through activities like you cycle through desktops. Use Ctl-mouse wheel or Alt-mouse wheel to cycle through the current desktop of activities for fast switching. FAST! The current slowness is a major reason to not use activities. There's probably a way to hack this with the current KDE, but, I just decided I like activities, and, I'm still fixing configuration issues at this point.

The desktop context menu option to switch activities is fast, however, the desktop activities context menu is of limited use. If you select activities for your context menu, your other options go away. This is one of the sore points of KDE. IMHO, the context menu should be Activities list (first), Konsole or other terminal option (second), Kicker menu (third) all on the same menu. Every freaking year, someone wants the incredibly useful xterm or konsole on the context menu, just like it was forever until KDE decided nobody uses xterm. This brings me to...

2) Fix the basics of Kicker & Kmenuedit (if that's what it's called these days): Menu editing and menu sorting have been around forever. I'm fighting right now to edit the applcation menus, deleting things that shouldn't be there, adding things that should. Why is that? My opinion is that KDE designers are trying to limit choice and trying to be smarter than the users. Someone must have said KDE was too complicated and that we users should get less choice. Don't listen to them. Kicker prevents me from editing favorites. Kicker has no knowledge of Java applications. Kicker doesn't do well with CLI programs.

KDE menu editor (0.8 ) needs to allow the user to sort in random order. Who the **** thought alphabetic sorting was going to work for everyone? I want important things at the top or possibly the bottom. I can't do that right now. So, that needs to be fixed.

3) Activity-dependent kicker menu: I can have thousands of apps (CLI & GUI) installed. I want to use activities to simplify my life by having my apps, files, etc organized by activity. KDE design is half way there, but, the kicker menu needs to automagically change from displaying all apps (general activity) to specific custom menus that contribute to the task at hand. This would increase the complexity of kicker & Kmenuedit, so, they really need to work well before doing something like the following.

Context clicking on a Kicker menu or submenu should have options: "Remove from current activity", "Add to Current Activity" . This would allow manual pruning. Kicker would also need a "Show All Menus" option somewhere to add things back that you didn't mean to remove. KMenuedit needs to track which activities gets each menu/submenu/item displayed. This seems simple until you add....

4) Social activity sharing: Setting up a good installed application list with appropriate apps on appropriate menus is a lot of work. I'm lazy. I want to steal someone else's menuing work, or just hand mine to someone else. Each activity should be sharable on various social media, discoverable, collaboratable (is that a word?). This means complexity.

Displaying menus & menu items is bad enough, but, you now have to keep track of the activity handle, activity name, activity URL, the status of a collaborative activity development effort, etc. Kicker & Kmenuedit aren't up to their current tasks. My big fear is that this checking will become procedural & therefore slow instead of using a local bitmask to quickly sort what should be displayed.

Also, when I hand off or steal my menuing system, I also need to install the appropriate software (including specific version, or latest, whatever), including resolving conflicts. That means Kicker/Kmenuedit needs to first check with the packagemanagement system to determine whether the install can be done (space, processor, video system, etc), and decide whether it should proceed installing the activity without installing every piece, and, what happens if some items aren't packaged but have to be downloaded somewhere?. The user needs a report on what to install. Can it open browser tabs to each of the download pages for non-packaged items?

Social activity sharing/stealing woudl be cool. Right now KDE is only slightly borked with menuing. What do you think? Can this be done, or did I just re-invent the grand KDE development plan without looking at it?

jdaniels wrote:Activities are nice but....we need social activity sharing.

Cycle through activities like you cycle through desktops. Use Ctl-mouse wheel or Alt-mouse wheel to cycle through the current desktop of activities for fast switching. FAST! The current slowness is a major reason to not use activities. There's probably a way to hack this with the current KDE, but, I just decided I like activities, and, I'm still fixing configuration issues at this point.

To rapidly cycle through activities using the mouse wheel (or any other key combination) when focus is on the workspace background:
Desktop -> Desktop Settings (via Cashew or right click w/ default settings) -> Default Desktop Settings -> Mouse Actions -> Set Alt + Vertical Mouse Wheel to "Switch Activity".

It was already in there, but hidden. Cool beans!

For #2: That is likely caused by bugs, not assisted by the fact the application and menu specification was designed to be highly dynamic and automatic - but not easily changed through a graphical interface.

When I encounter problems with the menu editor such as this, I often find running "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental" to be of help.

About activities in Kicker -- better change only favourites from global specific to activity specific.