Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 19, 2010 21:52 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet? by nix
Parent article: Aaron Seigo on the Future of KDE (Datamation)

A plasmoid can do anything any other program can do. Your plasmoid can be written to ask another machine for its stats.

And in fact plasmoids now seem to get cross network capability ("share this widget on the network") automatically. I haven't tried it and don't know the details of it though.

And they're only nailed to the desktop background if that's where you put them. They can also be on a transparent panel if you like.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 19, 2010 22:10 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

Aha! So all I need is a way to have a triple-width vertical panel with three plasmoids on it, and, er, it still doesn't work because they can't adjust their depth independently because they're nested on a single entity at the side of the screen. (And it's not as if I can use one panel on each side of the screen, because the whole point of this is that stuff overlapping your window on the right hand side is often not obscuring anything important. On the left, it's quite different. Also, they should be next to each other for visual-comparison's sake.)

Gah.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 23, 2010 16:50 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (4 responses)

While I'm unsure plasmoids can do all you want, they CAN run in a separate window if you like. Furthermore, KWin has a pretty powerful custom configuration. It does not work on non-window items like plasmoids on the desktop but it DOES work on plasmoids in a window - though I'm unsure if they are identified properly for you to do what you want.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 23, 2010 22:54 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

It looks like plasmoids in a window and the ability to position them precisely and hotkey-control their raising/lowering would do the trick. Unfortunately the latter still seems undoable, and if all the plasmoids have the same window class and name (as it appears they do), I don't see how KWin can distinguish between them to nail them in the right places. (But maybe it doesn't need to. I'll give it a try this weekend.)

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 24, 2010 8:48 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

You might be completely right. However, fixing the window class and name issue might be pretty doable, and adding the needed hotkey capabilities to kwin might also be possible.

Another thing, as I'm behind a plasma desktop now I can check out a few things, so let me do that.

I don't know what you need exactly, but under the global keyboard shortcuts (kwin) I see a lot of shortcuts. you can also give individual windows a shortcut and configure their options under 'right mouseclick on decoration > advanced'. Combined, does that bring you what you need?

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 24, 2010 9:42 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, I'm sure it's possible. It's just not *there*. :/

Ah well, the kde devs are not telepaths and I'd never mentioned any of this before. I'll repost it on the kde@ list shortly.

Combined and window shortcuts would let me switch focus to the window on a keystroke. These windows contain nothing but procmeters that don't respond to keystrokes, so giving them the focus is a waste of time; and it raises the window but does not lower it. also, the 'maximize does not cover the outermost procmeter' still isn't satisfied :/

gah. this took *five minutes* with fvwm2.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 24, 2010 10:06 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Well, I'm assuming you've seen all the capabilities of Kwin by now (I did find shortcuts to lower an active window but that's not what you need either is it?) so yes, I guess this simply isn't there. I wish you luck finding a dev interested in writing these features (or figuring out how to do it yourself).

Cheers and enjoy the weather :D