Can the desktop icons be focused when KDE opens?
With Buster, until this year, I used up/down and left/right keyboard arrow keys to select icons. In Trixie, left mouse click on the desktop is needed. Can a key be pressed to do what left mouse click does?
Thanks for your help.
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I feel like tab ought to work here, but it doesn’t.
Thanks, and the tab key works, after mouse click.
Also, I just tried in Windows 10, and tab would focus, desktop and taskbar, but only after I’d pressed the Windows key.
Yeh, this seems broken.
The Windows behaviour makes sense - when you log in, no application (including the taskbar or desktop which are the same application on Windows, explorer.exe) has focus. When you press the Windows key, it opens the Start Menu, which gives the taskbar focus. Subsequent keypresses are then sent to that application, so now you can navigate around your desktop.
Here on KDE, we can’t activate the desktop with the Windows key because the Application Launcher widget isn’t the same application as the desktop. But we can focus and activate the desktop with (by default I think?) Ctrl+F12. And that will work - but like you say, only if we have clicked once on the desktop. So, with that shortcut, we can give focus to the desktop by the keyboard. This should be the answer to your question.
Except, it still doesn’t work until we have clicked that one time. We can switch away from the desktop and then go back with this shortcut, and everything works as you would expect. And it does not seem possible to return to that initial state where you can’t navigate by keys.
I guess that the initial focus for the desktop is on some invisible element where we can’t move away from it(or back to it) by tab or arrow keys. Preferably, the initial focus would be on the background so that we can navigate by keyboard.
I would file this on the kde bug tracker https://bugs.kde.org/.