I wish if there was a way to configure one of them or both’s grid format, according to user’s wish, without being mutually exclusive like it is now.
A merge request is being made to auto-arrange virtual desktops in a grid even if they are organized in a row. This will decouple the desktop grid from the pager: if you organize them in a row the pager will work as a row, but an option will be present to auto-arrange desktops in a grid in the desktop grid.
After toying around several times with several VD (virtual desktop) layouts throughout my many years with KDE, I am currently using 9 VDs in 3 rows.
This produces a 3×3 grid, which apart from being æsthetically pleasing, produces an additional benefit that I only realised later on – it can be easily mapped to the NumPad-cluster!
The benefit of binding the VDs to the NumPad cluster is that it is very easy to map the visual memory of where a window is with the muscle memory of where the button for that VD is.
left
center
right
= Meta+7
= Meta+8
= Meta+9
= Meta+4
= Meta+5
= Meta+6
= Meta+1
= Meta+2
= Meta+3
(Because Plasma starts counting the VDs from top-left, while the NumPad starts counting numbers from bottom-left, the numbers on the buttons don’t match the numbers of the corresponding VDs. Because of this, I keep Meta-F1 to Meta+F9 as secondary bindings for VDs 1-9 – I use these bindings very rarely though.)
It also plays well into my mental model of VDs and Activities, where VDs are the extensions of a desk – giving more real estate, while Activities are different desks with different tools ready (e.g. communication Activity, organise yourself Activity, hackertrain Activity, … specific projects get each an Activity).
While I have Pager in the panel, it is more of a tiny overview than anything useful. So I usually use the Grid overview (Meta+g) and sometimes the general Overview (Meta+w).
How this looks like in practice (screenshots have captions):
I’m pretty pleased with this set-up, but there are two issues with it:
as others have pointed out, the Pager gets pretty crowded, so it’s not super useful; but if I had it stretch 9 VDs in a single row, it would consume too much horizontal space.
the Grid view does not show the VD names, but due to the strong visual-muscle association of their positions, this is not a problem in practice
the general Overview is of limited use as well, because it does not follow the 3×3 grid, but I mitigated that with the “emoji” arrows for names – what would make the Overview really useful for me though, would be if on the left edge it also showed the Activity switcher – that way it would be the go-to place for moving windows from the current VD to a different VD or Activity. AFAIK this feature was worked on several years ago, but doesn’t seem to have been merged yet.
I like the idea behind 3x3 desktop grid and numpad.
I personally like to make sure the shortcuts are accessible by one hand as I like to drag and drop files and stuff with other hand. So I have meta+1-5 then meta+[q, w, e, r] (but in custom keyboard layout).
Hope the above mentioned MR gets merged so that we can have dense grid overview.
Thanks for sharing this! I’m the author and can vouch for the code.
It should fulfill OP’s request exactly: de-coupling the Pager and Grid views by allowing the Desktop Grid to auto-arrange the desktops.
I wish it were easier to distribute as a script, but the Overview/Grid is a compiled effect and require a large list of cmake libraries. It’s easier to patch one’s system kwin to get the fix right away instead of waiting for bureaucracy.
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