www.michael-jansen.biz

Just a short note that i commited a change to kdebase reenabling shortcut support in kmenuedit. It's now possible again to assign a global shortcut to an application in kmenuedit. It was possible for some time in kshortcuts but it looks like no one noticed.

Please tell me if you have problem with that feature.

The gui side in khotkeys is not yet finished but i'm working on it. If someone would like to help polish that contact me.

Mike

When working with shortcuts you sooner or later encounter the problem of having action shortcut conflicts. Action shortcuts conflict if they are active in the same context and are either identical or one is part of the other (ambiguous).

Conflicting shortcuts in a kde4 application trigger some very frustrating behaviour: None. Nothing happens. No action is triggered. QShortcutEvents has a property to check if an event is ambiguous. QAction::event() checks if it is set and then silently drops the event. No signal is emitted.

Current State

There are three sources for conflicting shortcuts in KDE applications: shortcuts, standard shortcuts (KStandardAction and KStandardShortcuts) and global shortcuts. Global shortcuts are out of scope for this post.

My name is Michael Jansen. I'm 35 years old and a freelance config manager/developer from germany.

You can find my homepage at http://michael-jansen.biz . Only posts related to kde will be syndicated here.

I started contributing to kde in January 2008. That's pretty lame because i wanted to do that for some years. Developing is some kind of hobby for me since my real life jobs started to be more configuration management related.

This is my list of must have Firefox extensions. These are the extensions i can't live without. I put them here for myself so i'm able to setup new firefox installations properly without great hassle.

This is just my list of useful extensions. There are many more out there.

The source code repository of KDE is big. So big that it's nearly impossible to find all the gems hidden in there. One of these useful little tools is the kdeaccounts plugin from the kdesdk module. If you ever wondered how to find out the email address of a particular kde developer, look no further.

The plugin adds all active kde developers email addresses to your kde addressbook. Check it out: kdesdk/kdeaccounts-plugin

A week ago i started hacking on a python based kdesvn-build substitution. I did that for two reasons:

1. I wanted to use git locally.
2. I wanted to have an interactive tool, that does what kdesvn-build does.

Today i proudly present build-tool. It's not nearly feature complete but it does it's job. And i would like to get some feedback. Keep in mind that it's alpha quality. Noone else but me used it until now. So expect some failures.

Just a short test of kblogger. I neglected this blog for a long time but having a new contract and hacking on kde combined with the good weather here left me no spare time .

I switched to kde4 only 2 month ago. At the beginning i was unable to get the composite effects of kwin4 working with my nvidia graphics card. During that span i started to dislike one of oxygens decisions. I think i read somewhere it was a conscious decision. The following screenshort illustrates that feature. As you may notice there is no visual separation between the windows. The title bar has the same grey as the other windows background. The eyes have no help finding the title bar and that means no help in finding the menu. I hated that and switched to another window decoration.

I was about to do the same, but with Jos Poortvliet doing the work there is no need to do it twice. Head over to the Jos Poortvliet Blog for some screenshot of current plasma themes.

Tomorrow i hopefully will find time to write down some of the points i love and hate about the new kde version.

Mike

When i get into development mode with some time on the hand as now - i have finished my last contract in february and start my new on on 1st of april - it's allways the same. I tend to get up when the sun goes down and hack throught the night. After a good breakfast it's time for bed. During my xaraya time my fellow hackers thought i would live in america and were puzzled when they learned i'm an german.