KDE Power Features

KDE User and Administrator Conference

KDE Developers and Users Conference 2005

Speakers: Michael Brade

Language: English

Check the Schedule for an overview of all talks during this conference.

The main goal of KDE is to provide an intuitive and useful desktop for normal users. As such, most of the visible results tend to emphasize simplicity of use over any "power" features. That doesn't mean that those features aren't there, though, they just take a bit of hunting to find.

Some of the hidden treasures will be unveiled by this talk. Part of the presented features might have been already used by the potential auditor, part of them may be completely new to him. I will break up the power features into five categories:

using the keyboard more effectively
exploring hidden features
kio-slaves
automating common tasks
extending a normal GUI to do extra work

Using the Keyboard More Effectively

In this section the Alt-F2 dialog will of course be presented with it's hidden jewels like 4+2. I will introduce newbies to KMail keyboard navigation, show automatic scrolling in Konqueror/khtml, show how to create a quick note from an entry in klipper, create global shortcuts, explain shortcuts etc. Konsole has some beauties like Shift-Insert or Shift-Left/Right.

Exploring Hidden Features

Here an introduction to Konqueror's views will be given. I will show how to lock and link views and explain the concept behind it. Pasting urls to all sorts of places like a web page or the clear button of Konqueror will be shown. Also, the different completion modes might be of interest.

Furthermore, the AdBlock feature and web shortcuts have to be presented briefly.

Kicker's beautiful Quick Launcher can be used to replace the usual buttons and thus save a lot of space. More features in this area will be added, I just have to discover them myself first. Good that LinuxTag is near ;-)

kio-slaves

The main topic for this part will be the media:/ io-slave and how to map new resources. A short introduction to io-slaves in general will be given. The fish io-slave and the floppy io-slave should not be forgotten here.

Atomating common tasks and scripting

This is a big topic, but I will concentrate on the gist of it, only. kdcop and dcop in scripts will be shown and the role of dcop interfaces of KDE applications are demonstrated.