Comments on: Test driving KDE 4.0

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:38:14 +0000

*@lubos*: Desktop Cube is certainly not high priority. However, the thing is that most people writing reviews or experiences KDE 4 will only get exposed to the immediate visual aspects of the desktop. While having the desktop cube is certainly not a requirement, KWin will inevitably be pitched against Compiz Fusion, Mac OS X’s cube etc, so its just something nice to have.

Regarding keyboard bindings, in KDE 3 there is a LOT (perhaps too much) of flexibility in how and where key bindings are defined: each application has its preferences (though I think “Shortcuts” vs “Global Shortcuts” is too confusing and should go away); then there are global bindings for the Desktop and applications in KControl; finally there is KHotkeys. A lot of these are missing in KDE4. Againt, nothing critical, but nonetheless extremely important from a daily use perspective: when personalized the right way, key bindings can be a HUGE time saver.

Of course I can take screenshots with print screen or KSnapShot, thats not the point. What I meant was something like what Compiz provides: I can press Super and click and drag the mouse anywhere on the screen and the marked area on screen is instantly captured. I can not tell you how valuable this is, because more often than not you don’t really need to capture the entire window. For instance, I end up taking pictures of parts of web pages, or specific parts of the desktop or the application window. You can always take a screen grab and crop it, but again, it is all about making useful things extremely easy to do.

By: Lubos Lunak

Lubos Lunak — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:48:15 +0000

> Things I miss from Compiz Fusion: Desktop Cube,

When somebody does it. I personally don’t find it very usable (I get motion sickness from it), so I don’t consider it to be of a very high priority.

> better keyboard bindings,

???

> plugin to easily take screenshots,

Hit PrintScreen? Or together with Alt or Ctrl and then paste somewhere.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:52:35 +0000

*@aaron*: First off, kudos to you and everyone else who has been working so hard to bring KDE 4 out, thanks a lot!

Have you looked at GNOME Do? I think its going in the right direction. Its written in Mono, and is a little GNOME centric. I’m not sure if it is feasible to have any kind of compatibility between the KRunner architecture and Do plugins, but its definitely something to think about. Looking forward to rapid improvements in KRunner as well! :-)

By: Aaron J. Seigo

Aaron J. Seigo — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:36:35 +0000

> I’m eager to see a proper plugin framework around KRunner so
> that people can start building actions to all kinds of services

that already exists: Plasma::AbstractRunner. 4.1 will see extensions to it as well, such as scripting support and verbs-for-the-nouns.

note that runners that can be trained, etc, are not far off at all as the current classes can already accommodate that. there’s quite a bit of interesting stuff that can be done with it, but plasma is also taking my time. not enough chefs in this kitchen ;)

i agree that the UI has a long ways to go. i made the mistake of letting others who probably weren’t up to the task take two different runs at it and fail both times instead of just doing it myself. i’m not happy about it either.

the presentation, keybinding and all the rest of those issues stem from the UI which is actually the “i need something to show results right now, so put something together in an hour” UI i did probably 8 months ago now.

but beyond the UI, the krunner infrastructure is a lot further along than is user visible.