Save/Restore several desktop layouts

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 22 March 2008, Mark Constable wrote:
> On 22 Mar 2008 21:02, Florian Sievert wrote:
> > 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.

there are two related features that can come into play here:

* containment switching, which now works in trunk/ btw, lets you swap whatever 
your showing in a given View. so you can have a "play" containment and 
a "work" containment and then just switch between them before your 
presentation. this was one of the earliest defined use cases for plasma, 
actually. (it's nice to know that people will actually use it how it was 
expected =)

* applet sets are saved/restored from a single config object (e.g. a file, be 
default in plasma that's plasma-appletsrc0. individual containments are 
saved/restored from a single KConfigGroup within that config object. we don't 
have "save this containment out, restore that containment in" code yet, but 
at this point it's a matter of a few lines of code (Corona::loadApplets would 
need to be modified slightly to optionally not clear all existing applets, 
and then a call to corona()->loadApplets(savedFile()) would be all that's 
needed for loading)

anyways, the first feature is what you probably want unless you are on a very 
resource constrained system.

> I would just like to add that if this were possible per
> desktop then different layouts could be applied to each
> desktop and simply flipping between desktops could provide
> multiple layouts kind of "on demand".

we've already discussed this. i added code to View to make them Desktop aware. 
these some work that needs to happen inside of Containment (and some testing) 
and plasma-the-app needs to be adjusted to (optionally) create a view per 
virtual desktop. it's probably something we'll eventually support as an 
optional mode of operation (it's not something everyon would want and both 
implies more overhead and some different interaction dynamics), and some of 
the work is already done to that end.

> Having a presentation 
> and an assembly layout on different monitors would be handy.

a) this is usually up to the presentation application
b) if said presentation application is plasma ;) then this is already 
supported today
c) this is different that per-desktop layouts

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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