adding ShowDesktop action: show/hide all windows of a workspace

[Areopagitics]

Simple initial working ShowDesktop shortcut that either hides all windows if any are showing or unminimizes all; pending possible upgrade to save hidden windows to Workspace and then restore them from shortcut and clear them if another window is opened

[atiq-cs]

Yep, I rely on that feature heavily. I had been missing that a lot in cosmic. Thanks for working on it @Areopagitics 🚀

[Areopagitics]

@leviport The new changes implement ShowDesktop like in Windows.

[Drakulix]

I don't think this is a good user experience as the shortcut messes with the minimized state of applications. As such using it will not preserve the minimized state of windows. This probably needs @pop-os/ux design work, before it can be implemented.

Additionally this PR is of poor quality as it seems a bunch of merge conflicts were attempted to be resolved by simply reverting a bunch of commits?

[maria-komarova]

I agree, it doesn't seem the best experience if the shortcut does not preserve the minimized state of windows. My first thought would be that this kind of shortcut would need to preserve the state of all the windows. But overall it all required more thought primarily because of potential interactions when looking at the desktop. What are the specific cases when someone wants to look at the desktop?

[leviport]

Sounds like this isn't quite ready for testing, so I'll remove the QA review request for now.

[Areopagitics]

I don't think this is a good user experience as the shortcut messes with the minimized state of applications. As such using it will not preserve the minimized state of windows. This probably needs @pop-os/ux design work, before it can be implemented.

Additionally this PR is of poor quality as it seems a bunch of merge conflicts were attempted to be resolved by simply reverting a bunch of commits?

Thank you for the feedback! Did you see the updated pull request here a5b5761 ? This update does preserve the already minimized windows without adding too much new plumbing and also resets it. Let me know if I should start a new pull request with the update and close this one; it is included here though. I'm sorry about the other reverts, it was simply a mistake and not an attempt to resolve conflicts. There should be no conflicts!

If you want it done in a different way on the Shell level as a ShowDesktopMode then maybe we should rethink it, but it makes most sense to me to be at the Workspace level.

[Areopagitics]

2026-01-21.17-39-14.mp4

@leviport What should I do next? I answered @Drakulix but no follow up. I posted a quick video to show how it works. I also merged master into patch-1. If there is something missing let me know. Should I post this on the developer channel for others to test? 🦗

BTW. That's a bug in Cosmic that it shows the Show Desktop action twice (needs a separate issue).

[Areopagitics]

BTW. Feel free to change anything necessary ... the pull request is just a working implementation. I'd be happy if the feature came soon.

[leviport]

This is failing to build in CI, but not with a terribly useful log message:

E: Build failure (dpkg-buildpackage died)

[git-f0x]

There's this error in the CI:

error[E0599]: no variant or associated item named `ShowDesktop` found for enum `cosmic_settings_config::Action` in the current scope
   --> src/input/actions.rs:894:20
    |
894 |            Action::ShowDesktop => {
    |                    ^^^^^^^^^^^ variant or associated item not found in `cosmic_settings_config::Action`

Also needs cargo fmt.

[Areopagitics]

There's this error in the CI:

error[E0599]: no variant or associated item named `ShowDesktop` found for enum `cosmic_settings_config::Action` in the current scope
   --> src/input/actions.rs:894:20
    |
894 |            Action::ShowDesktop => {
    |                    ^^^^^^^^^^^ variant or associated item not found in `cosmic_settings_config::Action`

Also needs cargo fmt.

Thanks for checking! Yes, these other commits or changes (pop-os/cosmic-settings#1741, pop-os/cosmic-settings-daemon#123) need to be made in other parts of cosmic too so that this commit in cosmic-comp will work as I documented here, #1504 (comment).

[leviport]

Gotcha, I'll push those two into my testing branch as well to see if it helps. It would be helpful if that were mentioned in this thread, rather than just in that issue thread.

[Areopagitics]

@leviport perfect, will do that next time.

[leviport]

It's something I have to do, not something you can do.

Also I now have all 3 PRs in the same testing branch, but only the cosmic-settings-daemon one is actually building. I can't test this if it won't build.

[Areopagitics]

It's something I have to do, not something you can do.

Also I now have all 3 PRs in the same testing branch, but only the cosmic-settings-daemon one is actually building. I can't test this if it won't build.

Could you please post the error messages? I just built it again after updating using scripts/version-update.sh. I'd be happy to help you test it.

I posted this discussion pop-os/cosmic-epoch#3128 to make building and testing more easy.

[git-f0x]

You can see the error messages in the GitHub CI logs. You need to point the modified dependencies here to your branches for it to build for testing.
If approved, the PRs would then be merged in appropriate order, with the deps being pointed back to the main repos as each related PR is merged.

[Areopagitics]

You can see the error messages in the GitHub CI logs. You need to point the modified dependencies here to your branches for it to build for testing. If approved, the PRs would then be merged in appropriate order, with the deps being pointed back to the main repos as each related PR is merged.

I get it now... that makes sense. I'll update it referencing my own forks.

[Areopagitics]

@leviport I started a new pull request from the master branch that should build cleanly: #2089