Description

ActivityFox is a small KDE program that acts as a workaround to allow Firefox, Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers to play nice with KDE Plasma Activities.

ActivityFox lets you use separate browser instances for each activity, keeping tabs related to that activity. ActivityFox starts the browser with a profile linked to your current activity, closes the browser when you close the activity and automatically restores it when you open it again.

Usage

When run without specifying command line arguments, ActivityFox starts Firefox with a profile named as your current activity id, creating it in a default profile directory if it doesn't exist.

To launch Google Chrome or Chromium with a profile linked to your current activity, use the following commands:

activityfox --google-chrome
activityfox --chromium

If your browser is located in a location different from the default one, you should specify the location of a binary file:

activityfox --google-chrome --bin-path /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
activityfox --google-chrome --bin-path /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
activityfox --chromium --bin-path /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser

In case your profiles are located in a different directory:

activityfox --google-chrome --profile-dir /home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox
activityfox --google-chrome --profile-dir /home/<user>/.config/google-chrome
activityfox --chromium --profile-dir /home/<user>/.config/chromium

If you want to launch your browser with a specific profile, use:

activityfox profile_name

To make ActivityFox create profiles for new activities based on a template profile, first create it:

activityfox template_profile_name

Set it up by making your browser show tabs from the last time, then use this command to automatically create new profiles based on your template:

activityfox --template-profile-name template_profile_name

You may create a desktop file with this command and place it on your desktop or in your launcher menu. This way, in every new activity, you will be able to open a browser instance linked to that activity with an automatically created profile based on your template.

Hide ActivityFox window

Creating a visible window is required to make the session manager call our application on session saving, but it's possible to hide it with KWin rules.

Right-click the title-bar of the window, select More Actions > Special Application Settings. In the window rules settings that pop up, set:

• Size & Position > Minimized to Apply Initially, Yes
• Arrangement & Access > Skip Taskbar to Apply initially, Yes
• Arrangement & Access > Skip Pager to Apply initially, Yes
• Arrangement & Access > Skip Switcher to Apply initially, Yes

Build

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

That should give you the 'activityfox' executable in the build folder.

Changelog

0.2

• Add Google Chrome and Chromium support
• ActivityFox automatically opens the browser with a profile linked to the current activity id
• ActivityFox gently closes browsers by sending a signal to close the window, mitigating crashes
• Creation of new profiles based on a template profile
• ActivityFox restores browsers in activites they were initially launched

0.1

• ActivityFox launches Firefox and terminates it on session saving, restores on session start

License

GPL v3 Copyright 2012 Yuen Hoe (Jason moofang), 2018 Leonid Kalichkin (hellishnoob)