kwinOverview

In progress clone of GNOME's activities for KWin, as a QML/JS script (kwinOverview is not the final name). It owes a great debt to both GNOME Shell and Actos Dashboard (which doesn't work with KF5). It's sort of a spiritual successor to Actos Dashboard, and in fact reading through/tinkering with that code allowed me to learn enough QML/JS to write this. Written using QtQuick 2.7. Currently in beta, so expect bugs. Probably lots of them. Especially since this is the first QML/JS thing I've ever written.

Installation

  git clone https://github.com/ajoshpratt/kwinOverview.git
  cd kwinOverview
  plasmapkg2 --type kwinscript -i .

Activation

Like most other KWin scripts, it can be activated from the KDE system settings. The default registered shortcut is "Meta+A".

Usage

Once you've hit Meta+A, you can start typing to search for applications to launch. You can switch desktops by clicking/using the shortcut, and dragging/dropping applications to other desktops. You can click on another activity on the bottom dash to switch to that activity (hover over for the activity name). In addition, you can click and drag (or use the scroll wheel) the desktop dash above if there are more desktops than you have space available for! So it supports the maximum number of desktops you can have on Plasma.

Hovering at the bottom of the screen brings the activity dock up (it then autohides after you move the mouse away), allowing you to switch between activities.

Works incredibly well with https://github.com/rliang/kwin-dynamic-virtual-desktops, although there are now also buttons to add/remove desktops. You can still use the above mentioned script to handle your desktop creation/destruction.

Both the auto hiding and buttons will be made 'optional'.

Design Decisions

• Mostly, it was designed to be fast on my aging macbook pro. The biggest slowdown comes from painting the active live thumbnails. If you find this to be slowing down your computer, change the thumbnail scaling quality in KWin's compositor settings.

• In addition, I wanted to keep activities close but separate; hence why they're shown down below.

• I've avoided using plasma components wherever possible (although it's still tied pretty heavily to activities) to ensure that regardless of what theme you're using, the components are still visible.

• By using the KWin scripting interface, it doesn't actually rely on compositing! Although it really just shows the icon when compositing is disabled, so it's not THAT useful at the moment when that's the case. Perhaps I'll add some text for when compositing is disabled.

• Although I like scaling animations as much as the next person (visually, they're easy to parse), I found implementing them slowed down even my desktop with more than two windows on the screen; something about the repaints for the thumbnails is slow. Hence why most of the animations are fading/sliding around.

Known Bugs

• Sometimes the 'type to start searching' function doesn't work on switching desktops. Simply hide/show the dashboard to regain focus (if you're using the default shortcut, just hit Meta+A twice).

• Sometimes, swapping between activities 'hides' all the programs in the dashboard. Hide/show fixes this.

• I suspect the thumbnails are still being painted even when the dashboard is hidden, increasing CPU usage for KWin.

• Does not work on Wayland, AT ALL. Crashes KWin completely : ( I suspect this is because Activities themselves do not currently work on Wayland, and this makes heavy use of them.

Future Directions

It's mostly feature complete, although I'll probably tinker around with the design a bit.

• Add a configuration dialog. In particular, I'd like to make sure the blur effects are configurable (I can see how those would slow down the computer, under certain circumstances).

• Adjust how the grid configuration is done so that it takes more advantage of available screen space.

• Reduce CPU usage.

• Tinker with init/end animation timing. Ending feels a bit slow.

• Remove the silly grid bouncing effect when windows are added.

• Give it an actual name, instead of a working title.

• Add buttons to add/remove desktops?

• Cleanup the incredibly messy code.

• Add a license?