More a note to myself, but hopefully it will be helpful to others too! After updating to KUbuntu 16.04 a few months back, I had an issue where when I closed the lid to suspend the laptop, and then opened it again it presented both a gnome login/password screen and then a KDE5 password screen. When I used the button, or some other times when I suspended it only showed the KDE 5 Plasma unsuspend prompt. After some googling around I found a SO thread which pointed me in the right direction.
Going in to the org.gnome.desktop.screensaver of dconf-editor I deselected the idle-activation-enabled, lock-enabled and ubuntu-lock-on-suspend options and I’ve not had this issue ever since
I’ve just got a nice new laptop which is a bit wider than my previous one and so has a number pad on the right hand side. Because I don’t need another set of numbers I have ended up using the end/home/page up/page down keys quite a bit as to use them elsewhere you have to combine with the function key. However when trying to scroll back in the kde terminal (konsole) you need to do shift-page up or shift-page down but trying this combination of keys only displayed the numbers. Fortunately I found an option buried in the KDE keyboard setup that lets you keep this – go to Keyboard Settings -> Advanced and then ‘Miscellaneous compatibility options’. Tick the ‘Shift with numeric keypad keys works as in MS Windows’ and you’re done. While you’re at it you can also disable caps lock or change it to be something like escape by looking under the ‘Caps Lock key behaviour’ option in the menu.
Today I’ve been playing around with an incredibly powerful feature of KDE – activities. This basically means you can switch between entire sets of applications and virtual desktops very easily. As a consultant I usually have several different clients that I work for at the same time plus a set of programs I use personally. KDE Activities allows you to separate these and switch between them very easily. The default keypress to circle around the different activities is meta-tab but I wanted to be able to switch directly to a specific one, however this doesn’t have any specific support in KDE. Fortunately with Linux and KDE being so flexible I found a solution to this from this thread from 2011. As I was implementing it I noticed a number of changes that have been made so here is an updated version of the instructions:
Firstly, get a list of activity ID’s and their human-readable names; from the console:
$ for i in $(qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager/Activities ListActivities); do echo -n "$i : "; qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager/Activities ActivityName $i; done
872ecadb-1388-41fe-89c5-4475c7fd137f : AAA
05104b7f-5df9-4ba2-80bf-0b3eca8a501d : BBB
a20e63e3-6ac6-4e0c-9f0f-2eebb3dfcc8b : CCC
Then open up the “Custom Shortcuts” program and create a new shortcut using “Edit -> New -> Global Shortcut -> D-Bus Command”. Fill out the D-Bus settings as follows:
Remote application: org.kde.kactivitymanagerd
Remote object: /ActivityManager/Activities
Function: SetCurrentActivity
Arguments: 872ecadb-1388-41fe-89c5-4475c7fd137f
And you’re done!
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