Favorite KDE Tricks?

Nat asks: "Here I am, plowing along at work on an ancient machine, and thanking heavens for how much easier Open Source makes my life. In particular, I've ended up settling with KDE and its main tools due to its ability to be configured into a relatively fast and lightweight environment, despite its number of features and useful tricks. I have discovered a good few of those already, but would like to ask you guys for further illumination: what are your favorite KDE tricks?"

"I am personally very fond of multi-key shortcuts, which I base on the otherwise useless Windows key: Win-A for fast access to my most used applications, Win-W for all window management operations, and so on. I have other time-savers like: KIOs for upload, download and remote edition of files over SSH, and for access to locate queries from right within any file dialog. I have many more; but what are yours?

Conversely, what non-KDE tricks make your daily work easier and faster? What currently non-existing tricks would you like to see implemented? What are the worst time-wasters you've encountered?"

Launching programs with Kapapult

[glowworm]

Sure, multi-key shortcuts are nice but if you have too many of them they become harder to remember, especially those tasks you only do once a week.

I have been using a program called Katupult [thekatapult.org.uk] for many months now. It provides the advantages of shortcuts to programs and bookmarks without the need to memorise anything.

To execute this program you press your start key (Mine is Alt-Space) then you just start typing.

Xine? Alt-Space x
Firefox? Alt-Space f
Konversation? Alt-Space ko
Google? Alt-Space go
Slashdot? Alt-Space sl

Well, you get the idea. As you type an OSD box on the screen cycles through the choice for the letters you have typed. There is no setup, it calculates all the shortcuts dynamically. In a letter tie (say k) the more you type the more you drill down. I rarely have to type more than three characters for the most obscure program.

Yakuake

[Zygfryd]

This little application completely removed my need for an app launching menu, a run dialog or a graphical file browser.
It's a drop-down terminal supporting tabs, whenever I want to run something I just Win+` to bring it up and Shift+Up to open a new terminal tab.

it's all there for the clicking

[darkwhite]

The cool part about KDE is that functionality by and large isn't hidden from the user. You just run the core desktop environment, mess around with the Control Center, open up a few invaluable apps (amarok, kate, kile, konqueror, kaffeine, kopete, kpdf, showimg... the list goes on), bind a few global keyboard shortcuts, and you're good to go. Everything works as expected, and is integrated to the bones.

Just about the only trick I use that isn't in plain view is fish:// for opening directories and files over ssh. Works in editors too (edit files directly over ssh). There's a lot of fancy magic you can do with other kioslaves, but mostly either I don't have a use for them or they're too buggy to rely on.

Also, ~/.kde/Autostart is the equivalent of the Windows Startup folder.

Finally, you can skin GTK2 apps with your KDE theme with a GTK Qt theme engine (gtk-qt-engine).

Re:Focus management!

[theCoder]

You certainly can set that preference in Gnome. Under the Window preferences, where it says "select windows when the mouse moves over them", there is an option "raise selected windows after an interval" (text is as appears in Gnome 2.14, but I know that this option goes as far back as Gnome 2.0, since that's what is shipped with the Solaris 9 I use at work).

Still can't have different backgrounds for different virtual desktops (er, "workspaces") though. Not sure what's holding that simple option up.

btw, under most circumstances, your software shouldn't be trying to dictate how it interacts with the other windows (such as calling raise() on all clicks). That is the domain of the window manager. It would be very annoying if I had not set autoraise and some apps decided they wanted to raise themselves anyway all the time.

Re:Abnormal Behavior.

[linvir]

kmenu's behaviour might have changed since 3.4.2, the version that shipped with slackware 10.2.

My file manager launches and displays a complete directory listing in under two seconds. This is on a 2Ghz machine with 1 GB RAM and an SATA hard drive.

Far too long (hint: in Windows, it's nearly instant even on this 600MHz machine).

Something is wrong with your setup. There is nothing wrong with KDE.

Every time I say something bad about Linux, someone does this "Your computer/distro must suck because Linux/KDE/whatever is perfect" routine. This has happened ever since I started with Linux, through a few different computers and dozens of distros. That attitude is one of the few really annoying things about 'the Linux world'.