Hello,

I am currently using KDE 4.3.3 and cannot figure out if it is possible to change the order/arrangement of desktops in the desktop pager. Say I have three desktops with windows/apps relating to a continent:

Desktop 1 = Africa
Desktop 2 = Asia
Desktop 3 = Australia

I have the windows grouped into these desktops so I can change quickly from one continent to the next in a presentation, essentially using the whole environment as an active slide.

Now, I decide that I want to show Australia first. Therefore it would be nice to have Desktop 3 as the first desktop in the display of the pager. A vertical layout should then look like this:

Desktop 3 = Australia
Desktop 1 = Africa
Desktop 2 = Asia

Currently I cannot find a way to do this in an easy way in KDE. I have to rename the Desktops and move windows around. Gnome does seem to have a very similar pager. Irix used to have a desktop pager which let you drag whole desktops to new positions in the pager which is what I want.

Any ideas on how to do this with KDE 4 (perhaps Activities, somehow ?), or another DE ?

Thanks, Andreas

Moved to Plasma.

The method of operation you desire is not possible at this time unfortunately. KDE instead allows you to drag Windows between virtual desktops through the pager.

Activities are unlikely to help here, unless you can reassign the assigned activity for each virtul desktop.

Thanks for the confirmation. I actually looked at the source, and found that there is a fixed mapping between Desktops and (pager) Rectangles, such that Desktop[i]=Rectangle[i]. It would be necessary to have an additional mapping array desktop_of_rectangle[], such that Rectangle[i]=Desktop[desktop_of_rectangle[i]]

Can you reassign activities to desktops, easily or at all ? There is the option to have an activity for each desktop, eg. activity[1] is for desktop[1]. The activity bar lists activities in order 1 to n. So what would be needed is a way to assign activity[1] to desktop[i].

Andreas

viewtopic.php?f=67&t=76286&start=20#p134564

The above post seems to describe a way to assign activities to desktops by editing a config file.

I may try that.

I fail to see how activities would help you.

My suggestion would be to hack the pager widget, but it has its drawbacks:
1. Although not too hard to do, it requires some coding skills.
2. It would only affect the widget - the window manager still treats the desktop as they were in their "old" positions.

The idea was to use the activity bar instead of the pager. However, once you use the plasma option to have an activity for each desktop, the activity bar does not switch activities anymore, for me anyways.

So you are right, activities do not seem to help.

I am not a big c++ hacker (just some awk/python scripting). You are right, there are these option to drag windows from desktop to desktop in the window manager, and have the proper transition effects when you switch desktops. I do not know if the window manager looks at the pager to determine how the desktops are arranged, but I suppose it would have to. The proper way then would be to keep the desktop to frame mapping as it is (fixed) but make it possible to edit the position (and perhaps geometry) of the frames in the pager on a per frame basis.

The perhaps simpler option would be to have an additional pager widget, perhaps called arranger, which uses the mapping approach (although this could get confusing).

Andreas

Its the other way around actually, the pager looks to the window manager. Hence why the Plasma pager can have some issues when Compiz is used.

Hm, is the plasma pager not the only place which let's you specify the number of rows of desktops, and hence their relative positions ? I thought the window manager would need to know about the number of rows to be able to figure out to which desktop to switch when the mouse is at a screen edge ?

It might be more "natural" to let the window manager (via the Multiple Desktops System Settings) not only determine the number of desktops but also their positions, eg. currently by the number of rows but perhaps by something more flexible in the future. And then have the pager just visualize and switch desktops (although moving around Desktops in the pager would be also very "natural").

Blue sky ...

The number of rows setting is purely to allow control over how the Pager displays the available virtual desktops. Unfortunately I do not think they considered not-in-order visualisation of the virtual desktops when the specification was decided upon.