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I think it will be a good idea to implement an option to allow the activity bar widget to have a consistent size and position across all activities. It is a major PITA to go and add the plasmoid in every activity, and to resize and move it to approximately the same area on the screen in relation with the other activity bars. It soon becomes a test of patience, especially with five activities to set it in. Also, seeing slight changes in the size and position of the activity bar when cycling through different activities is not helping my current headache. If I had more screen real estate on my 15.4" laptop, I would leave it in a panel, but I need to see the tasks I'm running too.

Kubuntu Jaunty
KDE 4.3.1

I know that I can set everything up by editing plasma-desktop-appletsrc. However, the edits do not show up immediately. I assume that I have to stop/restart plasma-desktop. I also know that whatever changes I made to plasma-desktop-appletsrc will be overwritten upon logging out, reflecting the position of the applets at that time. So, one would have to logout from kde and go into the terminal to edit/overwrite the updated settings for one's own. It is not too difficult for someone who is experienced using the terminal, but I feel the whole process can be streamlined with an addition of a checkbox for this feature.

Another thing which might solve the problem is being able to mark applets as 'sticky'. Those applets would share the same data and have the same size and position across all activities.

You could take it even further and have stickyness applied to containments. This would let you have different panels on each activity.

priomsrb wrote:Another thing which might solve the problem is being able to mark applets as 'sticky'. Those applets would share the same data and have the same size and position across all activities.

You could take it even further and have stickyness applied to containments. This would let you have different panels on each activity.

I like your suggestion, so long as that people have the option to set/unset this behavior.

Being able to "stick" or "pin" plasmoids to all activities just as you can "pin" a window to all workspaces, is a good idea.

The ability to "pin" plasmoids is already described in another idea I think. Currently you can solve this easily by placing the widget in a panel.

Hans wrote:The ability to "pin" plasmoids is already described in another idea I think. Currently you can solve this easily by placing the widget in a panel.

I haven't tried this in 4.3.x yet, but I remember sticking widgets in panels that did not always work right in 4.2.2.

Hans wrote:The ability to "pin" plasmoids is already described in another idea I think. Currently you can solve this easily by placing the widget in a panel.

It would be better if you could also choose whether a panel should be "pinned" to all activities. With that feature, you could have different panels in different activities, which does make sense imho.

Here's the related idea: idea 76404.

Making the panel activity aware is already planned, as far as I know.

Hans wrote:Here's the related idea: idea 76404.

Well, that idea also suggests giving up activities in favor of workspaces with different plasmoid sets, which is imho a bad idea.

Making the panel activity aware is already planned, as far as I know.

great!

A panel dedicated to the activity widget and set to autohide works very well for me.

I would be in favour of a "pin" option for widgets, specially since the repeated widget isn't a "new" widget for that activity, but the same one as in the previous activity. Of course, this might raise issues with spacing over different activities (currently, I think KDE tries to prevent widgets from overlapping one another).

Here each activity has a "tab" at the right of the desktop. Why not use the tabs to switch between activities instead of having a separate activities bar?