Bug 336283 - Show also stopped activities in context menu
Summary: Show also stopped activities in context menu
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Alias: None
Product: kwin
Classification: Plasma
Component: activities (show other bugs)
Version: 4.97.0
Platform: Gentoo Packages Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: KWin default assignee
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-06-15 22:20 UTC by Elias Probst
Modified: 2022-07-27 15:13 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Elias Probst 2014-06-15 22:20:22 UTC
Currently the kwin context menu only lists running activities.

As I'm a heavy user of activities, I often run into the situation where I'd like to assign a window to an activity which is currently stopped.

To assign a window to a currently stopped activity, one has to open the activity panel first, start the desired activity, move back to the window, open the context menu again and then assign it to the activity.

I think it would be nice to have also stopped activities in the context menu. They should be visually different from running activities, e.g.:

o All Activities
--------------------
[ ] Development
[ ] Finances
[ ] stopped | Multimedia
[ ] stopped | Reading

Assigning a window to a stopped activity would start it in the background and then assign the window to it.
Comment 1 Martin Flöser 2014-06-16 10:00:17 UTC
Adding Ivan to comment on whether we want that change.
Comment 2 Ivan Čukić 2014-06-16 17:38:43 UTC
Not a fan of the idea tbh. Though, also not strongly opposed if it is in a submenu.

I do see the usability issue for that use-case, I'm just not convinced it is a common use-case.

My main question here is why do you stop your activities if you use them? For me, those are only for things that I don't want to delete, but don't use.
Comment 3 Elias Probst 2014-06-16 18:55:51 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> My main question here is why do you stop your activities if you use them?
> For me, those are only for things that I don't want to delete, but don't use.

For me, activities represent things I'm currently doing. The reason why I stop activities is probably mostly to stay focused on the current activities I'm working on, so I run into a scenario like:
→ Current activity is "Job#1"
→ I decide to listen to some music in the background and fire up my mediaplayer
→ I want to move the mediaplayer to my "Multimedia" activity to keep the focus on my work
→ I start activity "Multimedia" and assign the mediaplayer to it

Maybe I should re-think my workflow at this point a bit and simply keep all activities running.
What was the initial idea behind being able to stop activities?
Comment 4 Ivan Čukić 2014-06-16 19:06:41 UTC
> What was the initial idea behind being able to stop activities?

No idea. :)

Resource usage comes to mind, but I consider it a side-effect, not a reason. I remember Aaron talking about the difference of not-current and not-running activities as in you have a stock prices applet in one of them that you have set to show a notification that something happened. In the stopped activity, the notification should not be present, in the not-current, it should. For me, it is a minor case, and iirc not a working one since plasma now loads activities on switching, and not all at once.

For me, the context menu lacks a lot. That is one of the reasons I'm doing the windows-present-effect-with-drag-and-drop-to-activity-to-move-it-there thing.

To be honest, if the context menu gets extended to support this case (again, not really against), I'd like to find a way to extend it even further. One of the features that is requested is moving to activity instead of just adding to one.

I'll ask for the ideas in the forums.
Comment 5 Alexander Mentyu 2018-04-04 12:29:14 UTC
This wish also could involve not changing to single activity mode of right click Panel menu when there are two activities and one of the is stopped