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When plugging in new monitors, removing old monitors, etc, you often have to reconfigure the X settings to get everything working. It can be repetitive when you use a device such as a laptop, and you are constantly reconfiguring the system.

This idea is for KDE to save X configuration files (or just the display settings) into "profiles", much like those seen in many KDE apps.

When configuring your X settings, instead of "Save" it would be "Save New Profile". Saving the profile will ask you to name it after you accept the configuration. This save file will contain the X display settings, what displays you had plugged into your computer at the time, and the name you just made up.

(The first profile would be "Default", and it would be based on whatever you had on your computer at the time of installation) From then on, if you plug in or remove a display, it would check the profiles you have saved and see if there's a profile matching what you have plugged in. If a match was found, it would update and restart the X server with that configuration. If no match was found, it would behave as it does today.

Example:
A user has a laptop, which they use at home, on the go, and at the office.

When at home, the user plugs their computer into a large monitor, and they close the laptop lid. They might save this profile as "Home".

While on the train/bus/subway/rotothopter they use their laptop. Since they just use the laptop display, this might be profile they named "On the Go".

The user might plug their laptop into a smaller screen at work, to use as a dual-screen. This profile might be "Work".

So, while working at home, they have the laptop set to their "Home" profile. They leave for work, unplugging the screen from the laptop. The laptop detects this, and checks for a profile that uses just the laptop display - it finds the "On the Go" profile, and automatically switches to it, updates X, and the user is running. They get to work, and plug in their work monitor, it detects that too, and loads the work profile, updates X and the user is good to go.


The user may save 2 profiles with identical displays plugged in. If this is the case, the system will switch to the preferred configuration, but give a notification asking if they prefer one of the other profiles. It may offer a tray icon while there are other options available.

This could be useful if the user has specific tasks in mind. Say for example, they use a machine in a media center, but it is too weak to run multiple screens, or the video card drivers don't play well with multiple monitors; They could use saved profiles to quickly switch between tried-and-true configurations.


Lastly, this could eventually lead into working with activities (dbus?). Certain display profiles could trigger certain activities while de-activating the others. In the laptop example, the Home mode may have their personal comics/rss feeds/etc. Their travel profile may use the netbook interface, while their work profile may have their work tools. This would also be handy on tablets, too.

this is exactly what I need. I take my laptop between home and work and have to reconfigure the displays manually each time. very time-consuming. such a simple thing should have been included already!

There are some ideas in Solid’s Wiki about what is planned
http://community.kde.org/Solid/Projects ... ent/Design
There has not been any progress about that in the past half of a year, though.

this is exactly what I need. I take my laptop between home and work and have to reconfigure the displays manually each time. very time-consuming. such a simple thing should have been included already!

Been waiting a long time too...

I take my laptop to meetings. I use at in the coach at home, in my dock at home, in the dock at work. I thus have 3 different settings, and I need to switch between them on the fly. My Windows display driver, or windows itself, dunno, does this brilliantly.

KDE should be able to listen at DBus events and compairing available hardware with the profiles configured just as suggested above. Guess some code to move windows out of "orphaned desktop space" need to be added too....

Hi Guys,

it seems like not much has been done on this (correct me if I am wrong).
I am thinking of working on this and implement a simple "save as..." (to create profiles) and replace the "save as default" button that can be worked on further to improve the functionality at a later stage.

First target would be to create a way to save multiple configurations in profiles. What do you think?

Regards,
Shin