Bug 459961

Summary: Improve "move to activity" feature.
Product: [Plasma] kactivitymanagerd Reporter: avalonvales
Component: generalAssignee: Ivan Čukić <ivan.cukic>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: wishlist CC: antoine.vandevenne, avalonvales, hohenegger, kishore96, montana.angelborisov, plasma-bugs
Priority: NOR    
Version: 5.25.5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Other   
OS: All   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description avalonvales 2022-10-04 03:24:05 UTC 
SUMMARY
Currently, there is only one way to move a specific window to an activity, which is through selecting the relevant window by right clicking it in the task manager, and hovering over "Show in Activities" (https://imgur.com/a/Xv1FlnF). If there are other methods, they're not documented (see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=459959).

To be clear, I'm not talking about assigning a specific application to an activity so it launches there by default, I'm talking about moving it to another activity on demand.

What is visually and practically inconsistent is that currently the "Show in Activities" menu can also be accessed by right clicking the window titlebar, however the "Move to x" option is not present there (https://imgur.com/a/pWn7gpl). While you could manually select each activity to show it in, that's much more of a chore than simply clicking "Move to...", because you'd also have to uncheck the activity it is currently in. So I'm requesting that the "Move to" option be added to the titlebar as well.

Secondly, and perhaps this could be it's own issue, it would be nice to expose a dedicated shortcut to automate this process, as it's a frequent window operation if you actually make use of activities often. Currently the workaround for this would look something like this:

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_ACTIVITIES 8s -id $(xdotool getwindowfocus) -set _KDE_NET_WM_ACTIVITIES $(kactivities-cli --list-activities|grep [replace with activity name]|cut -d" " -f2

But hopefully you can see why this implementation is really messy (you can send your desktop to the shadow realm if you're not careful). Since "move to activity" already exists, I presume there's already a Dbus command that automates this action with greater elegance, however having scoured the internet for hours, I'm fairly sure it is not documented anywhere a user would expect it to (the documentation for this feature is lacking in general). Exposing that command with an optional keyboard shortcut is much cleaner, and is consistent with the other shortcuts available for similar window actions, such as "quick tile" for example, which moves a window to a predefined location.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Windows: 
macOS: 
Linux/KDE Plasma: 5.19.11
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.25.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.98.0
Qt Version: 5.15.6
Comment 1 montana.angelborisov 2022-10-04 10:26:03 UTC 
Upvote! would improve workflow greatly!
Comment 2 Ivan Čukić 2022-10-04 13:01:50 UTC 
IMO, this is the main way to move windows:
https://phabricator.kde.org/D29548
(was a bit improved since that commit - it now allows moving and adding to)

The documentation is always lacking unfortunately, we rarely get people that like writing it.

The 'move to' should have been added to the window (alt+f3) menu when it was added to the context menu of the taskbar, so I'm marking this as confirmed.

The key shortcuts would be also a nice idea.
Comment 3 avalonvales 2022-10-04 22:33:12 UTC 
(In reply to Ivan Čukić from comment #2)

> The documentation is always lacking unfortunately, we rarely get people that
> like writing it.

Where can I contribute to it? Is there a mirror on gitlab/hub?
Comment 4 Ivan Čukić 2022-10-05 07:42:41 UTC 
There's this page on how to get involved with contributing to documentation:
https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/documentation

I'm afraid that the docs format and the workflow are not what people would expect today.
Comment 5 avalonvales 2022-10-09 23:32:47 UTC 
Indeed! Somewhat intimidating for someone who only started dabbling with open source software in the very modern era of GitHub/Lab dominance. Even bugzilla feels somewhat limiting in its scope, I kept wondering how to add multiple attachments while writing this for example (you can't).  But all the more reason to admire the people who contribute. I think I might be able to help with translations, thanks for the link.
Comment 6 Andreas 2023-08-05 12:09:42 UTC 
I just discovered the feature described in Comment #2. If you are working with a mouse, that's perhaps the way to go.
In other situations, it would indeed be nice if the "Show in Activities" dialog would not close immediately when selecting an activity. Adding a window to a couple of these rapidly becomes quite tedious. 
I would vote for keeping the dialog open after click, and/or keeping it open on, e.g., Shift+Click, or keeping it open when pressing Space instead of Enter (which, currently, does not do anything).
The dialog could still be closed by clicking somewhere else (which does not require an extra Click unless you are disturbed by the open dialog), or by pressing Esc.
Comment 7 Kishore Gopalakrishnan 2024-06-29 16:27:38 UTC 
With 
kwin 6.1.1.2
Plasma 6.1.1
I have the 'move to activity' option in the titlebar's right-click menu as well.