Some time ago, I saw that CERN people had their own clang tree with a few addons, most notable one being the C++ REPL (C++ interpreter) called cling.

Now we had a presentation by Pere Mato from CERN who talked about their ROOT data analysis framework. It seems like a really nice and powerful piece of software.

The software is around 50 million lines of code, mostly C++. Some of it is python, but it is only used for quick-and-dirty testing of new ideas.

Another cool thing is that they use Qt for writing UIs, and that they also run Linux and KDE Plasma.

Starting on Monday, the Swiss part of CERN will become a home to a dozen Plasma generators. Apart from that, it will also have to store quite a few VDG and W2L components.

We expect a few new developments in the Plasma research, including an improved miniaturization ray that can shrink it to small screens with improved efficiency, and improvements on the Wayland purification system which will provide a tearing-free environment for Plasma consumption.

All this would not be possible without people who support KDE. Please consider supporting us.

For some time I used the Mirakel application to manage tasks on my phone and to synchronize it to the TaskWarrior on my main system. Unfortunately, Mirakel devs do not have the time to fix all the issues the application has with TW synchronization, so I’m unable to use it anymore. (yes, I could contribute to the app, but I’m not a fan of Android as a development platform)

I had to find an alternative - I needed just a one-way sync - to be able to create a note on the phone, and to have it pulled into TaskWarrior when I come home.

One of the (unfortunately not Free Software) services I’ve started using some time ago to collect clippings from the Web is Evernote. And it has a nice integration into Blackberry and Android.

I’ve decided to write a small script that pulls notes from Evernote that have a specific tag, and to put them into TaskWarrior.

The script does not have many features at the moment (it will get a few things more soon), but it works.

It can be found on github - https://github.com/ivan-cukic/taskwarrior-evernote

One of the things that bugged me for a long time in my workflow is that I sometimes forget that I have something running in another activity, and then get surprised that after a reboot, I have a couple vim swap files and similar.

At first, I was planning to add a simplified visual representation of active windows to the activity switcher similar to what the desktop pager does.

After some discussions, we realized that, while it may look cool, it would add unnecessary visual noise to an already information-filled space.

Instead, I decided to go for something simpler. The main information is whether there are any windows in an activity, not the count, and especially not their locations on the screen.

And here it goes:

And Plasma becomes the main product of CERN

In my previous post, I’ve written about the new setup I use for activities, and that I have found out that I’m missing the feature of quickly switching back to the previous activity.

I was planning to create a keyboard shortcut for this, but Johan Ouwerkerk had a better idea - that I should make the activity switcher behave like the window switcher (the Alt+Tab thingie) - that the activities should not be alphabetical, but that the most recent ones should go first.

This way, switching to the previous activity is just a single Meta+Tab away.

Details

Now, while the above is the main announcement, I also wanted to mention a tiny change to the Meta+Tab activity switching. Tiny, but important - as people say “the devil is in the detail”.

You might have noticed that for some time now, the activity switcher is showing when was the last time you used a particular activity. This information was useful, but not for the people who switch activities with Meta+Tab.

Previously, if you cycled through all activities with Meta+Tab, the last used times would all be set to the same time - because you did cycle through all those activities in one go.

Now, this behaviour is changed. The last used time is now changed only for the final activity you switch to.

Plasma to replace black holes

Not directly a part of this post, but stay tuned for more news - the Plasma team (and some other teams as well) will be gathering in CERN soon for a short development sprint, so Plasma is expected to get quite a few nice features.