Provide official Widgets for triggering Overview and Tiles Editor with a mouse click

[wz39]

As far as I can tell, there are no built-in Widgets that allow the user to place a button on their panel that opens Overview (Meta+W by default) or the Tiles Editor (Meta+T) with a mouse click.

This means that users might not even realize these features exist, since the primary way to trigger these views is their keyboard shortcuts. Other users may also prefer to open them with mouse, e.g. similar to GNOME’s Overview or Windows 11’s Task View button.

Does anyone else think it would be a great addition if both were offered as officially provided widgets in Plasma?

There appear to be some unofficial ones that do this on Get New, but I would prefer to avoid trusting 3rd party code for something as basic as this. Another workaround seems to be a manually created .desktop, but that’s too unintuitive for regular users.

I didn’t manage to find any feature requests for this, but there was the following topic that suggested it may be great to include at least Overview as a default button on the panel, which I agree with.

Replace virtual desktop pager with Overview button by default

I’d like to make a suggestion that the virtual desktop pager be replaced with a button that opens overview by default. I find that Overview is much better suited for working with virtual desktops than the pager. Another problem virtual desktop pager has is that it takes up a lot of space if you have more than one monitor and multiple virtual desktops. This change would also make the overview effect more discoverable, because the only way to use it right now is the keyboard shortcut. This is wha…

[skyfishgoo]

for overview you can assign screen edges (corners) to activate various things, including overview.

as for tiling editor, that can only be accessed thru the shortcut, but i recently learned of a 3rd party widget that will execute a command

Run Command Widget for Plasma 5

so if you have a command that types the shortcut for you (like xdotool) , then it can run it.

[wz39]

I understand there are currently ways to achieve this, but I think for the sake of user friendliness and discoverability, there should be an easy way with built-in Widgets.

[skyfishgoo]

the discoverability of the Overview feature is already handled by the Screen Edges feature (and just looking thru the Shortcuts)… Screen Edges is how i found it.

3rd party widgets (or other workarounds) are probably a better fit for this use case.