[FEATURE]: Applet that shows the current layout

[phrxmd]

Edited by the maintainer

Summary

Currently, there is no single place, where you can see which layout is active on the current surface. To know that information, you need either to press layout switch keys or try to guess it from the windows positions.

A clear and concise description of what you want to happen

It would be nice to have a UI (e.g. applet in the panel) that shows which layout is currently active on a screen.

[gikari]

Currently there is no single place, other than the config file, where you can see which layout is active where.

I am not sure that you can see the current state of layouts' assignation in the config file.

A KCM is a Configuration module, so it can only show what's configured to be by default. The current state of the tiling is not handled by KCM in any way, and it shouldn't. Instead, it could be shown in another UI component - applet (which is not ready yet), or overlay (which is present, but it cannot be triggered just to show the info).

I think a good idea is to make a Plasma applet/widget, that shows what layout is currently active on the current surface (i.e. screen space), see Activity Widget for the example. Unfortunately the applet development is blocked by upstream issue with KWin Scripting API (See #23).

[gikari]

I reworded your request (feel free to correct). Not sure if it's possible to combine all the functionality in the tray applet, because the applet should be big enough to show the layout name text and not be the single icon in the menu (although it could use layout icons recently introduced).

In the worst case, two separate applets would be created, where one will be in the tray and the other would be addable by users.