Plasma6: windows are not popped up/activated on opened links

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1

Hello.

After updating the system to plasma 6, I can’t eliminate very annoying behavior. If I open anything from a terminal like this:

xdg-open https://goo.gl

The default browser (Firefox, in my case) does not pop up but is highlighted in the panel. This behavior is the same for many combinations of the source apps. For example, clicking links in Slack behaves similarly, but it works from telegram-desktop.

dolphin .

It does not activate the dolphin, either.

Here’s how it looks
image

Here’s my system overview
image

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The support of the protocol for requesting activation of surfaces is marked as supported in KWin 6.0.1, but I think it’s not yet implemented because it doesn’t currently work with Plasma 6.0.3.

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KWin supports that protocol, but the issue is that in addition, both the sending and receiving app have to as well, and they also have to do it when launched from the command line, not just from the GUI.

In a nutshell, this is 442265 – Opening an app from konsole has no activation environment set, which is sort of a conceptual pickle. In the case of xdg-open, it could be patched to set the activation environment which would fix the bug. But this would only fix the issue for that one command; running dolphin . would still show the same issue.

A more general solution to make Konsole generate the appropriate activation environment and inject it into the command may be appropriate; hence that feature request still being open.

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The konsole itself is not an issue, I’d say. The whole workflow seems completely broken.

A random combination of applications seems broken because the second one is not activated by opening something.

I provided examples from konsole, but the same is valid for wezterm, slack-desktop and keepassxc.

Thanks for the answer. I get that it’s broken for long and no ETA to get it fixed v_v

5

It’s mostly fixed for GUI-to-GUI apps already–at least for the ones that support this protocol. It’s mostly the CLI executables that need support added.

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It can’t. Non-GUI application cannot request activation tokens. Only the application with the currently active window can.

7

Darn, that seems like an oversight in the spec, because there are definitely valid use cases for CLI apps to focus GUI apps.

Could we amend the spec and propose a -v2?

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Thank you for your answers and your work on this great desktop environment ngraham.

I have some data points to add.

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My previous post I didn’t finish. If a moderator sees these posts you can just merge them.

When I click on a link from Konsole using my mouse, it works. When I open a link using urlview from mutt, it doesn’t.

However, when I switch my browser from qutebrowser to Microsoft Edge, it starts working again. Links are opened up and activated in the other window.

Otherwise, the bug looks a lot like what is described here. Started happening when I upgraded to six.