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People have boon looking for an easy way to change activities. The activity bar does not seem to cut it for many people. I think an easy way to allows this is for using the mouse wheel when your mouse is over the cashew would cycle through your activities.

When you use the mouse wheel on the desktop, dashboard, or pager you cycle through your different desktops. When you use the mouse wheel on the task manager you cycle through windows. I think allowing this mode of interaction would follow the same pattern.

seams reasonable to me, as the "consistency" of KDE would be enhanced. +1 from me

Chani, one of the GSoC students, said the following:
23:48 tell them they should write a plugin for that when my gsoc project is done
23:48 it should be eaaasy

You can read about her project here.

Edit:
23:54 my plugin won't do *exactly* what they suggest
23:54 but it's a similar idea
23:55 my plugin is about changing waht happens with hte mouse on hte containment background itself. so, not the cashew
23:56 but hey, that just means it's a bigger target

TheBlackCat wrote:When you use the mouse wheel on the desktop, dashboard, or pager you cycle through your different desktops. When you use the mouse wheel on the task manager you cycle through windows. I think allowing this mode of interaction would follow the same pattern.

Only problem I have with that is that how the mouse-wheel operates now (if the pointer is over the desktop at least) is not consistent even now. It depends entirely on the containment used for the desktop, as well as the wallpaper engine in use.

What you describe is only true for the default containment, and some of the wallpaper engines.

Try these two (individually) to see (true in 4.3 beta 1 at least):

1. Switch from the default containment to folderview. The mousewheel doesn't do anything - least of all switch desktop.
2. Switch to the marble wallpaper. The mousewheel does no longer switch desktops. It zooms in and out of the globe. I seem to recall that's the case for the fractal and virus wallpapers as well.

The idea is sound, but the consistency wouldn't necessarily be improved. That depends on what the user used before this proposed change would be apart of an upgrade.

I'd say the different containments and wallpaper engines should be more consistent as well as implementing this.

@ Hans: I don't want to change activities when I use the mouse wheel on the desktop. I like it the way it is. This is a way to allow for changing activities by assigning it to a currently-unused function. That means it does not eliminate any existing functionality, it only adds functionality. Chani's suggestion requires eliminating an existing function and replacing it with a new function. You don't gain any functionality that way, and the mouse wheel on the cashew is still wasted.

@ Kryten: It is still consistent with the task manager and pager, which are more like the cashew than the desktop is.

Also, 2 is only the case if you set the marble wallpaper to "free navigation" mode. It works fine in other modes. It is the case with the Mandelbrot wallpaper if you have the wallpaper unlocked. It looks like this is the default behavior but it can be overridden by containments and wallpapers. I assume it does not work on the folderview containment because if you have enough icons it will have a scroll bar.

@TheBlackCat: Yeah I know. Chani said that she misread the idea the first time, but seeing the last sentence I quoted, it might be possible to assign mouse actions to the cashew too in the future using the plugin framework.

I would prefer to change activity by scrolling on button in cashew. We can also click on this button to select activity from popup menu.

Another way to change activity can be placed in desktop menu, but it's not so far good.

The problem with that is that it requires an extra click, leaves the scroll on the cashew unused, and is inconsistent with the rest of the plasma desktop. I wouldn't minding having a list of activities in the cashew menu, though.

TheBlackCat wrote:Chani's suggestion requires eliminating an existing function and replacing it with a new function. You don't gain any functionality that way, and the mouse wheel on the cashew is still wasted.

not exactly. I have two scroll wheels and four meta-keys, so I could have a *lot* of functions configured if I really wanted to

still, it does ignore the cashew...

while I'm here, a quick question. say you configure a cool plugin to run on ctrl+mousewheel. now, most applets don't care about the wheel and ignore it. say you do ctrl+wheel over one of those applets, and your plugin gets triggered as if you'd done it on the containment background. that's a bad thing, right?