Episode: 1863
Title: HPR1863: The Awesomely Epic Guide To KDE Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1863/hpr1863.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:21:44

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This is HPR episode 1863 entitled The Awesomely Epic Guide to KD Part 2.
It is posted against and in about 22 minutes long.
The summary is The Awesomely Epic Guide to KD Part 2.
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Hello again, this is Gedis with Part 2 of the tutorial The Awesomely Epic Guide to KDE.
Upgraded launch menu.
You might want to look into replacing the default launch menu entirely.
If you open the ad widgets view for instance and search for menus, you'll see several results.
Our current favourite is called Application Launcher, QML.
It provides the same kind of functionality as the default menu,
but has a cleaner interface after you've enlarged your initial window.
But if we're being honest, we don't use the launcher that much.
We prefer to do most launching through KRunner,
which is the seemingly simple requester that appears when you hold Alt F2.
KRunner is better than the default launcher because you can type this shortcut from anywhere,
regardless of which applications are running or where your mouse is located.
When you start to type the name of the application you want to run in KRunner,
you'll see the results filtered in real time beneath the entry field.
Press Enter to launch the top choice.
KRunner is capable of so much more.
You can type in calculations like Equal, SIN, left bracket, 90, right bracket for example,
and see the result in real time. You can search Google with GG colon or Wikipedia with WP colon
followed by the search terms and add many other operations through installable modules.
To make best use of this awesome KDE feature,
make sure you've got the Plasma add-ons package installed and search for a runner
on your Distributions Package Manager.
When you next launch KRunner and click on the tool icon to the left of the search bar,
you'll see a wide variety of plugins that can do all kinds of things with the text you type in.
In classic KDE style, many don't include instructions on how to use them.
So here's our breakdown of the most useful things you can do with KRunner.
The 11 most useful KRunner commands,
one, kill, left angle bracket, process, right angle bracket, terminate the selected process,
two, hash, left angle bracket, command, open the man page for a command, three,
left angle bracket, argument, right angle bracket,
open a website or app or document, four, file, colon, forward slash,
launch dolphin on the route directory, five, SMB, colon, forward slash, forward slash,
left angle bracket, share, right angle bracket, open a sample share in dolphin, six,
SFTP, colon, forward slash, forward slash, left angle bracket, SSH, space, site,
right angle bracket, open an SFTP folder in dolphin, seven, VNC, colon, forward slash,
forward slash, left angle bracket, server, colon, one, right angle bracket, access a remote desktop,
eight, desktop, space, two, switch to desktop, two, nine,
window, space, left angle bracket, app, right angle bracket, list and switch between windows,
10, left angle bracket, name, add sign, server, right angle bracket, send an email to a name server,
11, equals, solve, left bracket, x minus 20 equals nine, right bracket, solve equations
plus many other functions, file management, file management may not be the most exciting
subject in Linux, but it is one we all seem to spend a lot of time doing, whether that's moving
a download into a better folder or copying photos from a camera, the old file manager
Conqueror was one of the best reasons for using KDE in the first place, and while Conqueror has
been superseded by dolphin in KDE 4, it's still knocking around, even if it's been labeled a web
browser, if you open Conqueror and enter the URL as file colon, forward slash, it turns back
into the file manager of old with many of its best features intact, you can click on the lower
status bar for example and split the view vertically or horizontally into other views,
you can fill the view with proportionately sized blocks by selecting preview,
file size view from the right click menu, and preview many other file types without ever leaving
Conqueror, magia uses a double click for most options, whereas we prefer a single click,
this can be changed from the system settings panel by opening input devices,
clicking on mouse and enabling single click to open files and folders, if you've become used to
Apple's reverse scroll, you'll also find an option here to reverse the scroll direction on Linux,
Conqueror is a great application, but it hasn't been the focus of KDE development for a
considerable period of time, dolphin has replaced it, and while this is a matte simplified
file manager, it does inherit some of Conqueror's best features, you can still split the view for
instance, albeit only once, and only horizontally from the toolbar, you can also view lots of metadata,
select the details view and right click on the column headings for the files, and you can add columns
that list the word counts in text files, or an image's size and orientation, or the artist's
title and duration of an audio file, or from within the contents of the data.
This is KDE's semantic desktop in action, and it's been grinding functionality for the last
couple of years, Apple's OSX for example, has only just started pushing its ability to tag files
and applications, we've been able to do this from KDE for a long time, we don't know any other
desktop that comes close to providing that level of control.
Window Management
KDE has a comprehensive set of window functions as well as graphically fixed, they're all part of
the window manager KWIN, rather than the desktop, which is what we've been dealing with so far.
It's the window manager's job to handle the positioning, moving and rendering of your windows,
which is why they can be replaced without switching the whole desktop.
You might want to try KWIN on the RazerQt desktop for example, to get the best of both the
minimal environment RazerQt offers and the power of KDE's window manager. The easiest way to get
to KWIN's configuration settings is to right-click on the title bar of any window, this is usually
the most visible element of any window manager, and select Window Manager settings from the more
actions menu. The task switcher is the tool that appears when you press all plus tab,
and continually pressing those two keys will switch between all running applications on the
current desktop, you can also use cursor keys to move left and right through the list.
These settings are mostly sensibly configured, but you may want to include all other
desktops in the filter windows by section, as that would allow you to quickly switch to
applications running on other desktops. We also like to cover switch visualisation,
rather than the thumbnails view, and you can even configure the perceived distance of the windows
by clicking on the toolbar icon. The next page on the Window Manager Control module handles what
happens at the edges of your screen. At the very least we prefer to enable Switch Desktop on Edge
by selecting only when moving windows from the drop-down list. This means that when you drag
a window to one edge, the virtual desktop will switch beneath, effectively dragging the window onto
a new virtual desktop. The great thing about enabling this only for dragged windows is that it
doesn't interfere with KDE's fantastic window snapping feature. When you drag a window close
to the left or right edge, for instance, KDE displays a ghost's window where your window will
snap to if you release the mouse. This is a great way of turning KDE into a tiling window manager
where you can easily have two windows split down the middle of the screen area.
Moving a window into any of the corners will also give you the ability to neatly arrange your
windows to occupy a quarter of the screen, which is ideal for large displays. We also enable the
mode, similar to Mission Control on OS X, when the cursor is in the region of the top left corner
of the screen. On the screen edge left, click on the dot in the top right of the screen,
or any other point you'd prefer, and select desktop grid from the drop down menu that appears.
Now when you move to the top right of your display, you'll get an overview of all your virtual
desktops, any of which can be chosen with a click. Two pages down in the configuration module,
there's a page call focus. This is an old idea where you can change whether a window becomes
active when you click on it, or when you roll your mouse cursor over it. KDE adds another twist
to this by providing a slider that progresses from click to a strict hover policy, where the window
under the cursor always becomes active. We prefer to use one of the middle options, focus follows mouse.
As this chooses the most obvious window to activate for us without making too many mistakes,
and it means we seldom click to focus. We also reduce the focus delay by 200 milliseconds,
but this will depend on how you feel about the feature after using it for a while.
KDE has so many features, many of which only come to light when you start to use the desktop.
It really is a case of developers often adding things and then telling no one, but we feel KDE's
worth the effort, and unlike other desktops, is unlikely to change too much in the transition from
4.x to 5. That means the time you spend learning how to use KDE now is an investment. Drive in!
To round up this article on KDE, a word about visually fax. There's a wide variety of visually
fax in KDE, all of which can be enabled from the desktop effects section of the window manager
settings dialog. For many of them to work however, you'll need to be using the OpenGL compositing
type. This is dependent on your graphics hardware. Although most devices now offer accelerated OpenGL,
the option can be selected from the advanced page of the desktop effects configuration panel.
If you run 3D games or other 3D full screen applications, you should also enable the suspend
desktop effects for full screen windows option to maximize performance. Here's a selection of
our favourite desktop effects, some of which have a functional reason to exist. Our first effect
is Translucency. This is where the window your dragon becomes partly translucent. Options can
be used to adjust for any kind of window and element. 2. Magic lamp. When minimizing or maximising
windows, the window will stretch and zoom into the toolbar. It's useful for checking up on your
minimised apps. 3. Dim inactive. Windows that aren't currently active will go slightly dimmer.
We prefer to lessen this effect to a strength of 5 from the tools page. 4. Zoom. Hold down the
system metarchy, usually the windows one, and press plus or minus to zoom the desktop around the cursor.
5. Present. Windows. This effect works in a similar way to Apple's expose. Press Control plus
F10 to display thumbnails of all rain desktop applications. And lastly, wobbly windows.
Okay, there's no functional reason to enable this other than the endorphin release by contentment.
Use the options to change the amount. And that's the end of the awesomely epic guide to KDE.
Thanks for listening.
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