At last Tokamak (Plasma developer sprint), I’ve made a small KWrite proof-of-concept patch just to see how it will behave with the new activities framework - notifying system when it opens and closes a document. A lot of time has passed since, and activity classes were completely revamped, turned upside-down, went through one API review, and moved from the playground to kdebase/libs.

That original patch doesn’t exist anymore, and even if it did, it wouldn’t work for all the changes that were made to activities.

The uber-awesome KDE conference - aKademy - was a time for something new!

New client

Ok, after this introduction you’d expect that I’ve written another patch for KWrite. Well, you’re wrong. The first application that supports activities as a client is Vim! :)

The main reason I went for Vim this time was to prove that non-kde apps can work with our awesome concept of activities. Another reason is that I didn’t want to use KActivity* classes, so that I can see whether the d-bus protocol is sufficiently profound for this task. It turned out that it is, but there are some improvements to be made.

At the moment, only Vim invoked from a terminal emulator program (eg Konsole) can work with activities since I can’t find a way to retrieve the window id of a GUI-enabled Vim from vimscript, so I’m essentially using WINDOWID environment variable that terminal emulators set.

The following is a debugging output of the activity manager daemon related to Vim windows

resourceWindowRegistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/mailacc.txt
resourceWindowUnregistered: 54526034 file:///home/ivan/.vimrc
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///home/ivan/
resourceWindowRegistered: 85983274 file:///usr/share/vim/vim72/doc/options.txt

Truly limitless possibilities!!!

^^^^ just wanted to write an awesome marketing-speak sentence for the end of the post :D