(as an aside, i spent all of last wednesday thinking it was thursday. it wasn't until the next day, thursday, that i realized it wasn't friday but thursday and that the day before had to have been wednesday. the term is "temporally challenged". ;)
today i was building kde4 and looked at the icemon window sitting in the top corner of the screen with its jaggies and thought, "wouldn't it be nice if there was a kde4 port of icemon so that we could have something slightly less ugly to look at." i wandered over to the icemon code in trunk/playground/devtools/icemon (why is it in playground?!) and lo! there was a kde4 port. i fixed up the code a bit so it ran against current kdelibs and voila, i had a nice kde4 icemon:
what is the connection between freedom and liberty?like a magic 8 ball, icemon knows all
i also got time to work on krunner a bit today. you can now launch things with it even! =)
the above shot shows the composition manager support by way of the translucent background. that's because the svg used has translucent areas and krunner checks to see if you have a composition manager running. if you don't, or the svg used is opaque, you get something much less interesting/annoying (depending on your viewpoint ;). but it's real translucency. and yes, that's an example svg not something intended to be final; one of the oxygen artists (hey ruphy!) threw it (and a couple others) together for me in about 15 minutes the other day.
and just so it doesn't come as a shock to anyone: i have no plans to support anything but such real translucency in plasma. so if you aren't running a composition manager you get less bling on your panels (though the desktop canvas will still be properly blended and beautiful). the upside is that what bling you do get is both real and not just a silly performance hogging hack. =)
anyways, with a run command dialog that works i'll be able to move kdesktop aside in favour of a plasma canvas. yay. there's still a good couple days of solid work (unlike today in which i got maybe 3 hours in on krunner if that due to working on other items). so yes, i'm quite aware that there isn't any label telling you what this window is, that the options label is far too subtle and that the search runner can take over and not give control back to the shell or app runner. among other TODOs.
in any case, i'll probably check the code in either tonight or tomorrow morning (i have to go to the christmas concert at p's school this evening, so that'll dictate timing) so that others who wish to can help out. or just point and laugh at my code. their choice really. ;)
11 comments:
krunner vs katapult?
krunner == new 'alt+f2' dialog. Also, as Aaron said, no fake transparency and other nasty hacks allowed.
is krunner the new name for katapult?
all we need is an icecream icon now! ;)
yes, it isn't meant to replace katapult. it's a bit different from katapult in that it needs to support things like the help desk saying "click 'Run command' and now type ifdown eth0" and the user doing just that. =)
i hope to bring some of the nicer features of apps like katapult, such as doing more than just app launching and nice visual feedback.
one of the things i'll also be doing is integrating servicemenus with this so one can locate a file and then process it (e.g. "mail to") directly from this menu.
i need to keep it fairly simple though so that it's easy to audit for crashes or other problems and so that it isn't a bloat monster.
I also thought of Katapult as soon as I saw this screenie.
Getting rid of fake transparency is probably a good way to prod distros into supporting Xgl better.
this doesn't require xgl. it requires a composition manager, which in kde4 is integrated into kwin.
xgl is one method of indirect rendering which can aid the composition manager but it's not required for it.
so yes, you can get this transparency without xgl. the screenshots you saw, for instance, are not using xgl and it is plenty fast and very smooth =)
I'm wondering if there's going to be a duplication of effort here with the menu.
If the kickoff-type menu gets integrated into kde 4 (which is awesome, and has obsoleted katapult for me) then we're going to be having two things here doing the same thing: since the search in kickoff serves as the launcher and searcher, as well.
@apokryphos: i thought long and hard about the cross over between the menu and the launcher and they are similar but distinct, sadly.
for instance the lanucher needs to offer additional options like "run as other user", etc.. . c.f. the current dialog in kde3.
for support and emergency purposes, it also needs to be always available as opposed to an optional item like a start menu is.
Yes, the run dialogue is different to katapult/kickoff - it's like a single line terminal emulator (well, kinda ;-) e.g. if you want some single command like mounting something. I guess a lot of people don't use it a lot of the time.
I'm not actually a big fan of kickoff, it seems to take more clicks to do anything, though it might just be a case of getting used to it, which I won't because on the suse box I switched back to the normal menu. oh well
on-topic, krunner looks cool - it would be nice to see it get a few extra little features (but, as you say Aaron, not too many)
Run as a different user should be included, but I'm not sure about the relevance of "Run with different priority" and "Run with realtime scheduling". To my knowledge 95% of users don't use that, if not more. Which makes me wonder whether "Run as different user" couldn't either be incorporated, or just given up altogether, or have it somewhere in the menu.
How often do you need to run things as a different user? Doesn't seem that often to me. Anything that requires root privs should start with kdesu. There might be some apps that have different jobs as user and root but this is really only package management (as far as I've seen), and again I'm not convinced that they should ever run as user.
I'm thinking about this as I go along, and perhaps I do need to dedicate more thought to it but the comparisons with a launcher and the menu are quite striking. The menu *is* a launcher, for one thing. And what does our traditional launcher do? It launches things that are *in* the menu itself.
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