Actman

Contents

Desktop Activity Manager

Introduction

Desktop Activity Manager, or D-A-M, or DAM, or actman, is a command line tool and a status menu widget that allows saving and restoring of the destkop. There can be multiple saved desktops so it is possible to have different activities (desktop profiles) and switch between them by saving the current one and loading another.

Status menu widget

The status menu widget is a front-end to the command line tool. While it doesn't have all its features it is easier to use and handles all common user actions.

The main page includes the following actions:

  • Select: Saves the current activity and switches to the selected (highlighted) activity.
  • New: Create a new activity that is a duplicate of the current one
  • Rename: Renames the selected activity
  • Delete: Deletes the selected activity. It is not possible to delete the current activity
  • More: Shows more actions

When clicking "more", some more actions are shown:

Where:

  • Store current: Saves the current activity without switching to a new one
  • Reload current: Reloads the current activity

Command line tool

The command line tool is named "activity" and is installed in /usr/bin. It should be ran as user (and not as root!) and it includes a help screen:

~ $ /usr/bin/activity help  
Activity manager 1.1

Available commands:

  change DEST		Store current activity and load DEST.
  clone ACT1 ACT2	Create activity ACT2 as a clone of ACT1. Current
  			activity will not be changed.
  create ACTIVITY	Create a new (empty) activity.
  current		Print the current activity name.
  delete [-f] ACTIVITY	Same as remove.
  help			This help.
  list			List available activities.
  load [-f] SRC		Load activity SRC. If -f is used then it will be
  			allowed to re-load the current activity.
  new ACTIVITY		Same as create.
  reload		Reload current activity without storing first.
  remove [-f] ACTIVITY	Remove activity ACTIVITY. If -f is used then there
  			will be no questions asked.
  rename ACT1 ACT2	Rename activity ACT1 to ACT2.
  runstart [ACTIVITY]	Run scripts of entering an activity
  runend [ACTIVITY]	Run scripts of ending an activity
  store DEST		Store current activity as DEST.
  version		Print the version.

Activities are stored under /home/user/.activities

To get a list of available activities use "list":

/usr/bin/activity list 
car
clean
empty
main
main2
main3
Tei
Test
test2

To save the current activity and switch to a new one use "change", etc.

How it works

TBD

Running user scripts

Since versions 1.1, actman has the ability to run user scripts.

TBD