Favorite KDE Tricks? 104
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?"
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?"
i want (Score:4, Funny)
Here, try this: (Score:5, Funny)
You won't see any first posts, guaranteed. It will even tell you Slashdot+First+Post: no such file.
Re:Here, try this: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here, try this: (Score:2)
$ man rm
-f, --force
ignore nonexistent files, never prompt
Re:Best KDE trick.... PERIOD (Score:5, Funny)
Brian, I put it to you that you are quite a rude and unpleasant person. I call my first witness to the stand: you. We shall now be going through your past, recounting your various counts of rudeness, and along the way, I ask that the jury take special note of the defendant's immoral tendency toward "Windows advocacy".
The prosecution rests, your honor.
Re:Best KDE trick.... PERIOD (Score:3)
Re:Best KDE trick.... PERIOD (Score:1, Insightful)
Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:5, Funny)
A co-worker of mine awhile ago (win 98 days it i remember correctly) was giving a presentation off his laptop. He tried to go to his CDROM directory in explorer by typing F:, I guess
Nobody said a word.
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:1)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:3, Informative)
Run konversation or kopete. Right click on a nick. Chose addressbook->add contact
Then launch katapult with: alt-space then you can type in the nickname or the full name and then enter and that will start a chat with the person in konversation or in kopete, which ever is most appropriate (if the person is in both, it compares away status etc.)
Another cool trick is in konqueror you can type:
kde://radio
and it goes to the kde ra
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
What's the difference between that and the built-in Alt-F2? I can hit that, type 'ko' and cycle through konqueror, konversation, etc with the arrow keys.
Launching programs with KaTapult (Score:1)
Katapult "knows" the names of executables/bookmarks/... even if you never used it before, nice if you have a freshly installed box
Alt-F2 just remembers the last entries you already typed, and changes its icon to reflect the content type/icon of the thing your 'URL' is ponting at
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:1)
I only have two custom keyboard shortcuts: Alt-` to bring up a konsole shell prompt, and alt-k to bring up konqueror. The other few programs I use regularly find their way to the top of my K menu automatically.
I have to say that KDE ioslaves just rock. Being able to type smb://foo/data and get on a samba share, or even locate:ooga to find what I'm looking for is beyond fast and simple. Similar to Konqueror shortcuts, I find it faster to alt-k, then "gg:what I'm looking for" than it is to use the google
Re:Launching programs with Kapapult (Score:2)
Yakuake (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yakuake (Score:2)
Re:Yakuake (Score:2)
Re:Yakuake (Score:2)
Thank You! (Score:2)
multimedia keyboard + xbindkeys (Score:3, Informative)
I usually like to get a good multimedia keyboard with extra keys and use xbindkeys-config to bind them to some command. It's been a bit tricky to find one where all of the buttons work as expected, though. I'm happy with the current Dell multimedia keyboard (SK-SK8135 , ~$22) - the volume/media keys are backlit, and they didn't do anything stupid with the layout (like tranpose the ins/home/pgup block like in their
I also have an X10 / ATi wireless usb remote that I've programmed some of the buttons on. Unfortunately, it has six buttons labelled 'a' through 'f' that just send those letters instead of keycodes, so it's hard to do anything with them.
Anyway, sorry for throwing out mostly hardware suggestions
Re:multimedia keyboard + xbindkeys (Score:2)
But there is also a Latex input method. This means you can type, say, \theta in any app and get a unicode theta symbol. I use this daily in konversation (IRC client) to write math equations.
My least favorite "feature" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Well, technically I deleted them, I guess. What happened is that amaroK started showing doubles of all my playlists (I create one for each album when I rip it). The second copy was an obviously corrupt version, usually with only odd or even numbered tracks. When I came across these annoyances, I deleted the corrupt playlist. After doing this for a while, I found that deleting the playlist actually deleted the media files as well, without near
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
I do understand your conservative outlook, but Amarok finally got me to ditch XMMS - partly because the current version, 1.4, can be used to reorganize the files exactly as you'd like. And you can control when it does this.
Frankly, I find Amarok to be like iTunes, only better. Yeah, musicbrainz and lyrics aren't that useful when you are looking at really obscure stuff - but the
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Actually, the thing I really want is an Amarok-like interface that works well on a laptop with a small disk. I don't have space to cop
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Even from a tab completion point, it's not all that bad. So you have to type k first - it's not that bad. Just
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:2)
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:1)
Re:My least favorite "feature" (Score:1)
At least we have it better that the Windows world; where almost all the apps start with Microsoft...
-a.d.-
Focus management! (Score:5, Informative)
One of my favourite things about KDE (or, more specifically, kwin) is the way it handles focus. In particular, it doesn't enforce that the window in focus must be the window on top. Using the default (at least they were default the last time I did a fresh install) KDE settings, scrolling the mousewheel can be used to change the the focus to the window you're scrolling in, but without changing it's z positioning. Furthermore, once you've given a window this state in this manner, you can interact with it normally without fear of it popping on top again, until you a) left click on the titlebar, or b) it loses focus (and then gains it again).
While a similar effect is possible by using focus-follows-mouse, it also requires you to keep the mouse cursor inside the window you want to have focus, whereas with this method, the mouse cursor can be anywhere.
In the same vein, the alt+(left|right) mouse button combos, which by default are mapped to moving and resizing a window, don't give a window focus either. Thus, you can move and resize any window without fear of it a) coming into focus or b) changing z order.
Re:Focus management! (Score:2)
Here's the idea: DON'T RAISE THE WINDOW WHEN THE USER CLICKS!!! The window should only raise if the user clicks the title bar or if the program does a raise() function.
This was figured out in 1984 (read the X10 release notes where they removed the automatic raise that was in earlier versions of X). It was then lost in 1990 or so becase Windows did not do this and all the sheep blindly copied them. Since
Re:Focus management! (Score:5, Informative)
"Focus" tab:
Uncheck "Click raise active window"
"Window Actions" tab:
Left button: Set to "Activate & Pass Click" instead of "Activate, Raise & Pass Click"
Solved.
Re:Focus management! (Score:2)
What is really annoying is that I cannot assumme this because it is never the default. Especially because my software has to work on Windows as well. This bug seriously limits the ability to use multiple windows, the only way to make usable software is to not overlap the windows. The easiest way to do that is just to make a giant window and a "tiled" interface, like
Re:Focus management! (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, think back 6 years. Who ever thought anyone would be saying something like *that*? Next thing you know we'll be compaining that Microsoft Word is unable to open up the OpenOffice documents that everyone is passing around in email.
-matthew
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Focus management! (Score:3, Interesting)
Still can't have different backgrounds for different virtual desktops (er, "workspaces") though. Not sure what's holding that simple option up.
btw, un
Re:Focus management! (Score:2)
Re:Focus management! (Score:2)
If the window manager did not raise on click, Gimp could easily raise the toolbars itself when you clicked in the document window (and raise the document if wanted, placing it below all the toolbars).
But because of that damn window manager raising the clicked window, this is quite impossible, at least without a very annoying flickering effect, and on X you need to handle a whole lot of race conditions.
Re:Focus management! (Score:2)
I HATE such uppity software.
acroread is a good example of a program that is damned hard to work with because it insists on raising itself, obscuring everything else, any time the mouse passes over any part of its window.
I want software that obeys the instructions I have given it: only raise on titlebar-click; strict focus-follows-mouse. That's one of the reasons I dislike older netscape/mozilla/firefox
Re:Focus management! (Score:1)
Add a child panel that doesn't get in the way (Score:2)
Hash: SHA1
I like to have my panel have a large taskbar --I happen to
dislike grouping similar applications together, so I need more
screen real estate for my 5 instances of Firefox (each with 12
tabs), 7 instances of Kwrite, etc. I also want to have
app-launching icons easily reached on the screen. But the panel
doesn't have enough room to fit all this and still have a clock,
pager, a systray, etc.
So I put all my app-launching icons in another "child" panel,
extending down from
Re:Add a child panel that doesn't get in the way (Score:2)
Time-wasters (Score:2)
When I go to click on something in kmenu, if I miss it, I can't just move the cursor down and depress the mouse button on the program I actually wanted. All that happens is that kmenu disappears, and no app is launched.
Oh, and the file manager takes about five seconds to launch on my machine. That's a pretty big time waster.
Re:Abnormal Behavior. (Score:3, Interesting)
Far too long (hint: in Windows, it's nearly instant even on this 600MHz machine).
Every time I say something bad about Linux, someone does this "Your computer/distro must suck because Linux/KDE/
A KDE must-have (Score:3, Informative)
Are you fed up with those "smart key" tooltips that keep popping up in konqueror?
edit ~/.kde/share/config/konquerorrc
add this section:
[Access Keys]
Enabled=false
Now konqueror will provide an enjoyable experience without those obnoxious tool tips.
Re:A KDE must-have (Score:2)
Re:A KDE must-have (Score:2)
Re:A KDE must-have (Score:2)
KDE + Enlightenment + Xmodmap (Score:2)
Things I do (Score:5, Informative)
For KDE apps that have functionality exposed via DCOP, you can tie mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts to DCOP calls using the dialogue found in Control Centre->Regional & Accessibility->Input Actions. For applications you use regularly, this can be really useful. There is a DCOP browser you can use to explore the things that you can do with DCOP-enabled applications. Have a play with it and see what you can do. I personally use it for controlling Amarok. (an amazing app for anyone who hasn't used it BTW)
Have you messed around with the storage media notification configuration? When this feature first appeared, I worried that it might be useless and annoying, all popping up dialogues when you insert a disc, but some of the stuff you can do with it is quite cool. For example, if you use an external hard drive to back up your data, you could add an option to do that on the notification. Then, when you plug the drive in, the notification will pop up, and all you need to do is choose the newly-created option to back up your data. The dialogue you can use to do all this is found in Control Centre->Peripherals.
I hope some of these suggestions are of use to someone, and I also hope that nobody I know ever reads this post, as it is by far the most disgustingly nerdy thing I have ever written.
Re:Things I do (Score:2)
Re:Things I do (Score:2)
Try doing that without dcop.
Re:Things I do (Score:2)
Um, I like to thank Jesus, and um God and um (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, for starters, how about thanking the devs and the contributors? I didn't see any diety/atmospheric condition among the them...
My only advice for KDE users is to try out FluxBox, it just gets out of your way and let's you do exactly what you want to do. I know it's not what you asked, but...eh.
it's all there for the clicking (Score:5, Interesting)
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:it's all there for the clicking (Score:2)
Actually, that is in plain sight. From your desktop, open the System icon, go to Remote Places, and pick "Add a network folder". A wizard pops up asking you for the login details for WebDAV/FTP/Windows Network/SSH, etc, and it defaults to adding an icon for next time.
Re:it's all there for the clicking (Score:2)
Also kde starts a ssh-identity server (key-ring) on login. Open any shell and you can add identities in the normal way (ssh-add), then you will never be prompted for passwords from any kde apps.
My favorite KDE/X/ALSA tricks (Score:3, Informative)
While I don't much use the 'Shopping' button under Windows, I do use the multimedia buttons quite heavily. Thus, one of the little things that was keeping me on Windows [slashdot.org] was not having the very easy and convenient volume control & player controls. I use my soundcard as a preamp/mixer for a fairly nice stereo system with limited volume control. I also use my PC for DVD playing, TV, gaming and recording my guitar, so these buttons are more than convenient.
Additionally, I could never get the Win key to behave exactly like it does under Windows.
So, after lots of scripts and man page viewing, and some KDE control panel fussing and ALSA documentation reading, I've got it all glued together. The post ended up being huge, so I turned it into a journal entry:
X/KDE/ALSA Trick [slashdot.org].
I hope somebody finds this useful; it was a little more than trivial to put it all together. I realize this is more a series of general Linux/X tricks, but KDE is involved; and you did ask for non-KDE tricks as well.
gameforge
Re:My favorite KDE/X/ALSA tricks (Score:2)
THANK YOU!
I remember using xev back in '97 or something
And now
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
ioslaves... (Score:5, Informative)
Someone else already mentioned fish:// (remote filesystem access over ssh). the audiocd:// ioslave is nice as well - put in a music cd, type "audiocd:/" into konqueror, and you get a "virtual" directory of WAV, MP3, and Ogg-vorbis files. Drag and drop and it automatically encodes them to "real" mp3/ogg/wav files as desired.
And, of course, k3b is one of the handiest GUI programs ever - normally my nerdly pride insists on using command line tools, but k3b is just too nice.
Re:ioslaves... (Score:2)
Thanks, I didn't know about audiocd:/
I don't normally use KDE, but that's pretty sweet. I also agree on K3b.
Re:ioslaves... (Score:1)
Time Zones Display (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have a windows key! (Score:2)
Oh... wait... I mean...
NEENER NEENER! I don't have windows keys! La la la, I'm an insensitive clod!
*hugs and dances with his model-M, best Xmas present Ever*
Make Konqueror Start Faster (Score:3, Informative)
Look up the top of Konqueror, click on Settings->Configure Konqueror
Now on the right hand window were the icons are scroll right down to the bottom, look for a icon marked Performance, its rocket shaped one, right click on the icon.
Now on the left side pane, turn on "Preload an Instance after KDE has started up"
Set the pre loaded amount to "2"
Regarding the memory section I have it set to "File Browsing Only"
Click on "OK" or "Apply", thats it all done.
Re:Make Konqueror Start Faster (Score:2)
Background images (Score:2)
Clipboard history search (Score:3, Informative)
I know it is bad form to promote what you have been heavily involved in but...
Configure Klipper to store more than the few items which is the default. Somewhere in the 500-1000 should be a nice number.
Now, when you need something you snipped a few days ago again, try ctrl-alt-v, write a bit (it's a regex, btw). Instant typeahead search in the clipboard history. I love it! :)
Also, fullscreen apps, and making the panel wide, horizontal and coverable are nice tricks :)
kio fuse gateway (Score:2)
While a little tricky to set up, this allows you to use all of the wonderful KIOSlaves inside *any* application (not just KDE apps) by mounting a gateway directory under FUSE. Want to edit a file over SSH or FTP in the GIMP without explictly copying it locally? No problem.
time-wasters (Score:2)
kded has crashed... freeze freeze
But the stability of KDE at work is most likely to blame on the poor choice of distribution, rather than on KDE itself.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:time-wasters (Score:2)
I too run KDE on FreeBSD (as well as Linux) and it very rarely crashes anymore (V3.4 under FreeBSD 6.1, and v3.5 under Kubuntu 6.06).
I think in the earlier days there was much less effort put into making it run properly on FreeBSD also - it was more linux focused. But, things have improved :) KDE is my standard desktop whenever I'm working on a Linux/BSD box now :)
Check out the gentoo forums (Score:2, Informative)
The same question was asked on the Gentoo forums some time back, and generated quite a long thread.
See here [gentoo.org]
File operations as root in Konqueror (Score:1)
To do this through knoqueror:
For me this is often a lot fa
'Iconify all window' should really iconify (Score:2)
In KDE on RHE3, when I use a shortcut to iconify all the window on the desktop, if one of my window is open on all the workspaces, it is iconified only on this workspace not on all the workspace, and the iconfication is only temporary if I switch workspace and come-back, the these window are opened again, grrr.
Plus when I click on a window on the task bar which is already opened, KDE iconify it, I'd prefer KDE to put it on the front.
All I want to know is (Score:1)
Re:Summary (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:I got it to run under Windows (Score:1)