Phaengris

If, by any weird reason :) you need to switch KDE activities with a shell script, that's how.

Why?
Investigation story
The script to switch activities

Why?

I wanted to have a script which could get me to a KDE activity by it's name. Useful for make panel shortcuts, or to use in other scripts.

Investigation story

First, how the script can find which activities I have in the system?

qdbus is the tool for communicating with KDE services. It's autocompletion is a useful way for browsing services and their methods.

$ qdbus org.kde. Tab returns a long list of services, which include some ActivityManager. Let's check it.

$ qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager Tab gives me ActivityManager/Activities

$ qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager ActivityManager/Activities Tab gives me the list of methods, where I found ListActivities, which in it's turn responds with the following

$ qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ListActivities
f88efd5a-be2b-412a-91f1-c0a2a06eb887
a30ed1cf-a6ca-47cf-afed-79eaaeb1b1cc
65688522-6e3b-414d-8e72-8ff109f50c4a
9baa0a26-52f1-42c4-9b12-4d851719022c

That's close, but not exactly what I need. We, humans, used to refer to things by their names.

Another method, ActivityName returns the following

$ qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ActivityName f88efd5a-be2b-412a-91f1-c0a2a06eb887
Default

That's seems to be the way to determine activity name. And the name of yet another method, SetCurrentActivity, supposes it can do the job I want to.

$ qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities SetCurrentActivity f88efd5a-be2b-412a-91f1-c0a2a06eb887
true

The script to switch activities

#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [ $1 == "" ]; then
	echo "Activity name required"
	exit 1
fi

target_activity_name=$1
target_activity_id=""

for activity_id in `qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ListActivities`; do
	activity_name=`qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ActivityName $activity_id`
	if [ $activity_name == $target_activity_name ]; then
		target_activity_id=$activity_id
	fi
done

if [ $target_activity_id == "" ]; then
	echo "Activity not found"
	exit 2
fi

qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities SetCurrentActivity $target_activity_id

Enjoy :)

#tech #linux #kde #shellscript #shellscripting