Practical uses for KDE Plasma Activities

Most users of KDE Plasma have probably heard of Activities [1], but few ever use them. The trouble is that, although Activities have been a feature of Plasma for almost a decade, detailed examples of how to use them are few and far between. The result is that one of the most useful expansions of the classic desktop metaphor remains neglected, leaving users struggling along with desktop environments that are barely adequate for modern systems.

Classic desktops with a menu, panel, and workspace worked well when 200MB hard drives were the norm. However, as systems have grown, users have been struggling with a growing problem. Either their desktop is so crowded with launchers that finding the one they need becomes difficult, or else it contains a general set of icons that may not be ideal for any specific task. Increasingly, users have become accustomed to launching applications from the menu and leaving the desktop a blank space – a solution that is less than ideal because modern menus have also become unwieldy.

Activities remove these difficulties by removing the limitation of a single desktop. Each Activity is a separate desktop, with its own set of launchers for applications, files, and URLs, customized for a single purpose. Since any purpose rarely requires more than a dozen launchers, each resource can be quickly located.

Just as importantly, each Activity provides a specific rather than a general set of resources. All of these resources are a single click away, providing immediate access without the distraction of drilling down a menu. Activities themselves can be reached by keyboard shortcuts or by adding the Activities Bar widget to the desktop (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Activity Bar widget is a convenient way to switch between Activities. The current Activity is highlighted – here, the default desktop.

Although users may be unaware of the fact, Plasma's default desktop is an Activity. For some users, this single Activity is all they need. However, those who want to organize themselves more efficiently can add Activities by selecting Activities from the desktop toolkits (Figure 2).

Figure 2: You can view Activities from the desktop toolkit.

In Plasma 5, an Activity can have two layouts. A Desktop layout is one to which you can add launchers freely. By contrast, with a Folder View, the entire desktop displays the contents of a directory. This directory can be added to contain launchers, like the default desktop, or else a directory displaying files and directories as in a file manager, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: In Plasma 5, each Activity can have a Desktop or Folder View layout.

And how can these features be used? A flippant, if truthful answer would be any way you imagine. However, if you are like most users, the following case studies should help you jump start your imagination.

Full-Screen Applications

Like virtual workspaces, Activities are a convenient place to run applications like a web browser or a terminal that you want to run full-screen. The difference is that, in Plasma 5, virtual workspaces cannot be customized individually. With Activities, you can set up applications permanently so that they can run at a click.

Organizing Tasks

You can limit the number of icons on a workspace using a filter, but having a separate Activity for a task reduces the necessary amount of fiddling with controls. Probably, task-based Activities are the most common. In fact, when Activities were newer, one of the examples circulating was a sample by Aaron Seigo of an Activity for planning a holiday. If I remember, it included links to airlines and hotels, as well as websites about historical sites and tourists attractions at his destination.

Figure 4 shows the icons on the Activity that I have set up for writing. On the left are the tools I use for writing: Bluefish and LibreOffice. Bluefish is placed on the left because it is the one I use the most, since most of the editors for which I write prefer articles in plain text or with minimal HTML formatting.

Figure 4: An Activity set up for writing, showing launchers for applications on the left, URLS in the middle, and files on the right.

In the middle are URLS for online resources I use frequently: an Old English dictionary for translation, a rhyming dictionary, and a thesaurus. I do not include a general purpose dictionary, because I make a point of never using a word I am unable to spell, but others might find such a link useful.

On the far right are directories I use for housekeeping. The income-2017 folder includes invoices I have submitted and a spreadsheet listing everything I have written for the year and how much I am owed for each article, with separate columns for American and Canadian dollars and Euros. The 2017 folder contains the actual stories, both as I submitted them and as I revised them at editors' requests.

Originally, my Writing Activity also included a link to a screen capture Activity. However, I soon realized that running the applications I was writing about in the same workspace as my writing tools cluttered the desktop and slowed me down. These days, I run the applications in a separate Activity.

For instance, since I write a regular command-line column for Linux Pro Magazine , I have an Activity named CLI that displays one launcher for screen capture, and one for Konsole, KDE's terminal application.

For larger projects, I often have separate Activities. When I was writing my book Designing with LibreOffice [2], I had an Activity that included LibreOffice, which I was using both for writing and as a reference, a screen capture app, and links to the chapter file directory and the chapter graphics directory.