Save/Restore several desktop layouts

[Florian Sievert]

Hi,

I am not sure, if something like that was discussed before (in fact I 
would wonder if not), but I was not able to find anything about it. 
Because of this, I didn't want to add a new wish to bko. If I slip 
something or searched with the wrong terminology, please reference me to 
the location, so I could read more on. thx.

I am using KDE 4.0.x on my notebook at university and of course it is 
much fun to play around with plasma and some different applets. However 
not in every situation it is good to have so much "toys" on the screen. 
I often place some nice frame applets to uninteresting parts of the 
wallpaper to feel more comfortable. Before an presentation however, I 
would like to remove them to have a blank wallpaper without anything 
that might distract the listener. Additionally, I like to change 
wallpapers quite often and the main motive is often on a different place 
on  the screen. So to make it looking nice again, I often have to move 
or resize the applets to fit into a fine new position. Having about 5-6 
applets all over the screen, this might take some time and is especially 
nasty, if you know that you might change the wallpaper a week later 
again and have to do it again. I guess this problem is similar to people 
who had been sorting the icons on KDE 3.5 to fit somehow on their 
current wallpaper.

So I asked myself, if it would not be nice to save the current state of 
the desktop (wallpaper, panels, applets etc.) under a profile name to 
allow changing between them within a few clicks. I could imagine that 
the toolbox would be a nice place to put something like "profiles", 
showing a window where the user can select or save plasma desktop 
layouts. The user just put the applets all over the screen to fit his 
needs and then save the current state. Later, if the user load the 
profile again, applets and wallpaper would be in a fine position again. 
For example somebody like me could create a "privat" (with some applets) 
and a "presentation" (ex. with a plain screen) profile to switch between 
both before or after a presentation within seconds.

I am not sure about technical problems in the background, but I imagine 
that it won't be much more than offering a possibility to save and load 
several different "plasma-appletsrc" files? However, I think that it 
might be usefull for several people, making there lives much easier. Is 
anything similiar planned yet?

Best regards,
Florian