www.michael-jansen.biz

We have done it. Just lay back and glow in what we achieved: Kontact/khtml are on par with Outlook/Internet Explorer

That looks SOOOO convincing.

It's about time to pencil my two cents about the gran canaria desktop summit into the great notebook called world wide web.

I'm contributing to kde since January 2008. This years akademy was my first ever conference of any kind. I knew noone and my hotel was flooded with gnomies. Nice guys really. And they didn't even bite. Who would have thought of that :).

Had two nice weeks. But i suspect beeing part of some of the greater kde communities like plasma, kate, marble, koffice ... makes it even more interesting. I even had to explain why i chose to mostly work on kdelibs stuff :). Interesting question but i'm not quite sure my answer helps in attracting more people to work there.

I met my favorite kate developer ... anyone working on a vi mode HAS TO BE a great person. I even tried to motivate him by offering a crate of beer for a working vi command line mode. Erlend ... don't forget about that. Beer has a drink-by date here in germany and in eager anticipation i already bought the crates. Yes i make it two crates :-) . I'm waiting!

Met some nice local guys and prompty forget their name. Guys if you are out there reading this please contact me. I'm the tall one with curls. And i want to have that picture you guys made.

We made a nice picture showcasing that in kde we grow with our projects. Blauzahl has the better version were you have a standard of comparison (chani iirc) but since she failed to post it yet i will have to do it. Update: Daniel posted a link to the image in the comments. Thanks.

Andre Wöbeking, myself, Volker Krause, Lubos Lunak and David Faure with Chani in front.

And i have never seen any of the pictures showcasing that kde people know how to party. I mean those drinking two beers simultanuously. The dancing adventures of mr. knut. claudia, erlend, andreas, casper, me and ... dancing.

Have a look at my galleries at smugmug. Thanks to ervin for pointing out the site. But he could have posted about the referal program. So if someone out there wants to have it's own smugmug gallery please contact ervin or me.

• Gran Canaria - Las Palmas. Not desktop summit related pictures of the city.
• Gran Cararia - Desktop Summit

See you all next year.

See Bug 190412 for an explanation. The problem is a little broader than the bug reports. See Bug 193085 for a more detailed explanation of the problem.

The problem was me fixing khotkeys without completely adapting it to the new global shortcuts framework in place for kde 4.x . I just didn't realize the consequences. Khotkeys in 3.x ungrabbed the shortcut if the condition was not met or the khotkeys was inactive. In other word whenever the focus was not on an konqueror window ctrl-w was freed. With 4.2 that important bit of functionality was lost. ctrl-w was grabbed all the time. My fault.

If you are on kde 4.2 and want to have your keys back then go to the input actions kcm (kcmshell4 keys) and remove all shortcuts associated with inactive hotkeys. Or go to the global shortcuts kcm (kcmshell4 keys) and disable all khotkeys shortcuts you don't like.

With 4.3 inactive global shortcuts are not grabbed anymore. I made the change last weekend. if you get your hands on the next snapshot and still have problem with that ping me.

That is some kind of unexpected comeback from a classic out of the pre kde 4.0 development time. I once managed to break the 'e' key for all when working on khotkeys. Me fixing khotkeys exposed a qt bug. Qt did parse the "Win+e" string from kde 3.x as 'e' because it didn't recognize the Win modifier. It is called Meta in qt. We fixed the symptom because we couldn't fix the cause and everything went smoothly for some time.

Then reports about that problem having a comeback started to creep in but i couldn't get my hand on someone experiencing it. Not everybody looks my way when having keyboard problems. The last days comawhite - a irc regular - had the problem and we could pinpoint the cause.

The problem this time appeared because of a different reason. comawhite is a gentoo user and his x11 setup didn't provide a modifier usable as the meta key. You can check that with xmodmap -pm. I get:

xmodmap:  up to 4 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):
 
shift       Shift_L (0x32),  Shift_R (0x3e)
lock        Caps_Lock (0x42)
control     Control_L (0x25),  Control_R (0x6d)
mod1        Alt_L (0x40),  Meta_L (0x9c)
mod2        Num_Lock (0x4d)
mod3
mod4        Super_L (0x73),  Super_R (0x74),  Super_L (0x7f),  Hyper_L (0x80)
mod5        Mode_switch (0x8),  ISO_Level3_Shift (0x71),  ISO_Level3_Shift (0x7c)

For comawhite mod4 was as empty as mod3. Some kde code didn't care and still grabbed the shortcuts with meta in it globally. Meta was just dropped. So for 'Meta+E' only e was grabbed, for 'Meta+X' only x was grabbed. Makes up for a pretty messed up session. And you couldn't notice the reason because the code didn't trigger the action. So the key was just eaten.

I fixed the kde code and comawhite fixed his setup by adding

xmodmap -e "add mod4 Super_L"
xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = Super_L"

And qt having some problems with parsing QKeySequences from String. Since nokia opened the qt repository to external contribution i will try again to fix it. See my Qt Patches.

Update 20.05.2009

I just found out that there is another problem having this effect. See Bug 193150: can't type 'e' key. After starting amarok it get's even uglier. Best idea is to skip current snapshot and use the one from next week.

That's because on some keyboards Alt+PrintScrn is used as Sysreq. You can use xmodmap -pke | grep -i print to check if you are affected. If you get something along the lines of keycode 111 = Print Sys_Req Print Sys_Req Print Sys_Req there is no alt+printscrn for you.

Someone managed to put a really bad hack into kde hardcoding keycode 111 to the printscrn key so it worked if you changed the shortcut manually in the config file. That code managed to be there since 3.x. So much to the many eyeballs theory :-) : I removed that hack so it will stop working with 4.3 because it breaks keyboards where 111 is mapped to some other key.

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.

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.