Sunday, April 17, 2011

Keyboard layouts in 4.7: two new features

4.7_Feature_Plan: kde-workspace

1. Global shortcuts per layout - seems like it's been a wanted feature for a while. This feature has been in master for some time so I am hoping to get some feedback (before 4.7 is released) as global shortcuts is not the most straightforward thing in KDE.

2. Remembering/restoring layouts for session. It was a bit more code than I wanted it to be (due to remembering layouts per application especially if spare layouts are on) but this bug (52095) has been there since 2002 (and couple of others have been duped to it) so those who were that patient definitely deserve it :)
Note: restoring layouts works for all switching modes except "By window". I am not sure if there's an easy way to restore layouts by window: currently keyboard daemon remembers layouts by WId which is transient. Theoretically we could try to store layout information into window properties
and let kcmserver restore them and then keyboard daemon will have to read that but that would be quite different from what it does now so that might take another 8 years to implement :)

4 comments:

  1. about the global shortcuts, I'd get rid of the KDE component dropbox and just show all keyboard shortcuts by default., let the user filter/search if he/she wants. Now

    By default an empty or very limited list is shown (just one app), that is confusing. I know, the large list can be daunting but that's why there is search. Having to HUNT DOWN that large list is hard esp if you don't know what you're supposed to do with "kde component" or in what "kde component" your shortcut is... eg no end user knows what kde daemon is...

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  2. These are wonderful news! Thank you so much for these great features, they are (or, rather, will be) greatly appreciated.

    mutlu

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  3. @jospoortvliet I'm a bit confused, are you talking about shortcuts in keyboard layout switcher or in the KDE shortcuts module? If second I have no impact on that so it's a wrong place to put suggestions.

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  4. @Mutlu thanks! I must say that neither of those two is trivial so I was hoping to get some feedback before the 4.7 ships. As usually the bugs start to come up only after the version is released.

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