[Plasma Addons: Cube] Clicking on desktop with the Middle Mouse Button should allow to rotate the Cube

Brainstorm
1

In Compiz, you can press and hold the Middle Mouse Button on empty desktop space (wallpaper) to show and rotate the Desktop Cube by moving your mouse, and then release the button to enter the visible virtual desktop. This is really useful for quickly switching virtual desktops using only the mouse, together with positional awareness of which desktop you want to go to. This positional awareness is lost when using the infinite sidescrolling loop of just scrolling up/down on the KDE wallpaper to switch with no cube, so Compiz’s desktop cube is really useful for me.

Right now in KDE you can only open the cube with a keyboard shortcut, so I need to do the keyboard shortcut, then click with the left mouse button to rotate, and then double click to open the desired desktop which is a lot of keypresses and requires the use of the keyboard.

Lately I’ve been trying to migrate from Compiz+XFCE to KDE Wayland, and this is one of the few remaining things stopping me from better enjoying my time in here.

I understand this is a niche use case, but I believe more people would see the benefits of this experience if they gave it a chance and tried out a complete implementation of the cube for a bit.

It’d be really cool to have that feature in KDE! :sparkling_heart:

(I’m really not sure if this should go on discuss.kde or bugs.kde, since Plasma Addons’ readme says to send it under plasmashell on bugs.kde but that makes me choose a component and there’s no “plasma addons” component under plasmashell and it also shows a message saying if something is not a bug it should go in discuss.kde)

2

In the meantime, you could create a desktop app which emulates the keybinding to open the cube. It’s a pitty that that custom shortcut thingie is discontinued. With it, you could assign pretty much anything. I used to use it for a jgmenu on rightclick ( openbox style).

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1 Like
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I see what you did there - describe a very convoluted workflow… but the truth is that you can use your keyboard shortcut to open the Cube, then the arrow keys to navigate and ‘enter’ to - well, enter the desktop.

Also, it’s only a single click to enter a desktop - not doubleclick…

  1. Activate the cube (Meta_C, or assign to a thumb mouse button)
  2. Hold Left Mouse to rotate
  3. Click once to enter.

Or…

  1. Activate the cube MetaC (can assign to thumb button on mouse)
  2. ←→⏎ Enter

Though personally, I find Grid is the most useful tool for the job and Cube is just a bit of a novelty brought back entirely for nostalgia reasons.

4

Quick question, is the cube working for anyone else. It doesn’t seem to work for me anymore.

System Info

Operating System: CachyOS Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.17.9-2-cachyos (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER - driver: 580.105.08 nvidia-open

So after a reboot, cube works again. I generally put my desktop to sleep each night, so it appears that somewhere along the way the ability to use Cube dies and cannot be re-enabled until reboot.