Saturday, March 22, 2008

Configuring Views in Konqueror

In Konqueror for KDE 4.0 it was not possible configuring the views within the settings dialog. As Konqueror uses the Dolphin KPart, it was required to start Dolphin for this task. Well this nasty issue will be a thing of the past on Monday:


I'm relatively new to the KDE development and still I'm amazed over and over again about the great capabilities of the KDE framework. Guess how many lines I had to change in Konqueror for getting in the settings? It was exactly one line of code :-)

For sure I had to do some minor adjustments in Dolphin for making it possible to export the settings, but also here we speak about quite few lines of code. It's really fun developing applications with such a great framework as base. Kudos to all KDE people that made this possible during the last 10 years...

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about renaming "Icons" to "File symbols"? My mum would not know what "Icon" means...

Unknown said...

@anonymous:
> What about renaming "Icons" to
> "File symbols"? My mum would not
> know what "Icon" means...

I'm not a native speaker, so I don't know what's easier to understand... :-( The term "icon" is used quite often already throughout KDE AFAIK, so if this is really a problem we'd have to fix this everywhere in my opinion.

Kevin Kofler said...

"File symbol" is vague, "icon" is a precise and very common word, so IMHO the current naming is the right one.

IMHO it is a big mistake to replace precise technical terms with vague ones. Programs will tend to use different vague terms, so it's bad for consistency, and some are really too vague to be understandable.

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering why do you wait for Monday. Does it introduce changes in the API? If not, there is no need to wait.

Unknown said...

@anomymous:
> I'm wondering why do you wait
> for Monday. Does it introduce
> changes in the API? If not, there
> is no need to wait.

No API changes are done for this, but I've done another API addition yesterday which touches some Dolphin files and I don't want to risk that I accidentally commit a wrong file.

Anonymous said...

What about the multi-column view that we have had in konqueror for years? Is there a reason why it's gone away in KDE4? I found it very useful, and I think many people liked it too.

Unknown said...

@Dijkstra: a column view in Dolphin is already available. Which kind of "multicolumn view" do you mean? If you mean the treeview: this will be available in the KDE 4.1 version of Dolphin.

Unknown said...

@Dijkstra [Update]: I just checked on the KDE 3 version of Konqueror what you mean with "multicolumn-view". This is available in Dolphin already: Just configure the alignment of the icons view from "Top to Bottom" to "Left to Right" in the settings dialog.

Anonymous said...

Wow! I found the option, and it's exactly what I meant. Not as intuitive as in konqueror3, but I find it a very elegant solution.
With this and the tabs, I'm now officially a Dolphin user. Thank you!