Remember which Activity each window is in

Help
, ,
1

Hi all — I’ve just made the switch from XFCE to KDE. I’m trying to set up “Activities”, but I’m running into an annoying problem. When I log out and log back in, every open window is moved to the current Activity; they don’t stay in the Activity they were in before I logged out.

This is annoying because I want to use the Activities as a productivity and organization tool to separate different things, and having them be all plopped into the same area on every login disrupts that. I’m not sure if this is intended behavior or a bug. Is there a workaround?

(Note: I’m not currently using any login manager, in case that’s relevant.)

2 Likes
2

@terafluxglow:

First, welcome to the KDE Discuss Forums.

Right click on an application’s Window Title Bar → choose “Further Actions” → choose “Setup special settings for this Application” «I’m roughly translating from German rather than trying to find the appropriate KDE Handbook … »

  • Insert a new Property → choose “Activities” → set-up the application to always start within a specific Activity.
1 Like
3

This works as expected on X11, but on Wayland session management that takes Activities into account, AFAICT the still needs to be (re-)implemented, but it is work in progress already.

But a work-around is (I was typing the same thing while @Franken14679 posted it):

BTW, if you are using Firefox and want to have different ones in different Activities, this is how I manage that:

If you do that, I suggest you also add activityfirefox,firefox as ignored applications, so it does not spam you with default Firefox Profiles, when you log in or unpause an Activity.

To do that, you go to System Settings and there go to Session ↦ Desktop session

4

Thank you! But it seems like this doesn’t meet my needs. Suppose I have the file “WorkStuff.txt” opened with emacs in one activity, and “PersonalStuff.txt” opened with emacs in a different activity — I want those windows to stay where they are by default. (I don’t want emacs itself to be tied to a specific activity.) Is that the behavior which is in-progress?

I tried logging out from X11 and logging back in with it, but it didn’t work; some windows still just jump to the most recent activity upon login.

1 Like
5

Then, you’ll have to associate the filename and it’s location to a specific Activity – <Open a certain file (e.g. an odt file, that should be opened in LO Writer) only in specific activity>

6

Sorry to bug you, but just to double-check: are you on X11, not on Wayland?

I don’t use Emacs, so I haven’t tried it with that, but in general this worked on X11 for many applications.

7

@Franken14679

Then, you’ll have to associate the filename and it’s location to a specific Activity

Meh. That’s too much hassle — I don’t want to have to go configure some setting every time I make or rename or move a file. If I could associate it per directory, maybe that would be usable? But as it stands I think I’ll just tolerate reorganizing everything when I reboot. (This also still doesn’t recover the commonsense behavior I’d expect — if you have a file open in one activity, and the same file open on another activity, then KDE should remember which window was in which activity.)

@hook

Sorry to bug you, but just to double-check: are you on X11, not on Wayland?

I’ve been on Wayland. After I read your comment that it worked as expected on X11, I temporarily switched to X11, to test to see if it worked for me. It works better than on Wayland, but it’s not consistent.

(Unrelatedly, I think I’m switching back to X permanently anyway, because of a different problem with Wayland I’ve been having (pynput doesn’t work consistently on Wayland, and I can’t find a fully-working equivalent).)

8

What I do is:

  1. create an Activity
  2. tag files and directories to be associated with that Activity
  3. create on the Activity’s desktop a Folder View plasmoid/widget and set it to show only the files/directories associated with the active Activity

That way I have all the relevant files nearby, and by clicking on them it opens it in the right Activity. I only set the window/application rules for the applications that I don’t use to open/edit files (e.g. mail, chat, PIM, …). That seems to work fine for me.

1 Like
9

I’m looking at doing the same thing. I have the folder view widget on the desktop with tagged files/folders (good). I’m wondering if there’s an easy way to add application launchers as well. Have you done anything like this?

10

In Kicker (or whichever app launcher menu you use), you can right-click on any app entry and set it so it’s by default either:

  • shown in Kicker as favourite in certain Activities (or all of them); and/or
  • pinned in the panel in certain Activities (or all of them)

Does that help, or did you have something else in mind?

11

Yeah, that should work for me. Still getting used to KDE (came from windows ~2 months ago).

My current approach was to create custom launchers (.desktop files) per-activity and pin them to the taskbar, but they are associating with the wrong launcher after being launched. I think it’s associating with the first .desktop file for a particular application (vscode).
The app launcher might be a good approach for this, as I only want to be able to launch it once.