23rd May 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Menu usability gets improved. Kdeprint gets printer capability access, and quite a few bug fixes. Kate now has command line access to variables, similar to vim commands or emacs local variables. Plus numerous fixes to keyboard handling, Kspread and Konqueror.
Aaron J. Seigo fixed one of the glaring usability issues with KDE. If you right click your mouse in konqueror, you get 21 menu choices. Here is the fix for the konqueror menu. Work has also begun on a "task oriented menu" extension. The README states in part:
TOM stands for Task Oriented Menu and is a work in progress that will become a viable alternative to the current KMenu...

A task oriented menu displays it's entries as "things to do" (or tasks) rather than simply listing all items that are available.
For those of us who couldn't live without a command line interface, Luis Pedro Coelho posted a patch that enhances drag and drop function in Konsole. He said:
Treat all dropped URLs into a konsole equally using kfmclient. This allows you to drop a link from konqueror into a konsole and with a click download the item into the cwd.
This caught the attention of a number of developers. Carsten Pfeiffer asked:
may I ask for a popupmenu asking whether you want to paste the URL or launch kfmclient? I'm often browsing some ftp server, looking for a file and want to wget it in a remote ssh session.
Pedro Coelho responded:
You have the options paste, cd into, copy, move or link (only dragging exactly one local URL gets you all the options, others are get you a subset).

This happened already with local URLs, I just thought it would be good to extend it to all URLs (got tired of typing "wget " all the time + wget has bad integration with kde cookies, authentication, etc).
Alexander Kellett jumped in:
got a patch lying for doing wget on drop of remote urls actually. maybe i shall commit/redo when i get bored :)
Pedro Coelho responded:
It does "kfmclient copy" or "kfmclient move" of the dropped file. I thought about wget, which has the following advantages:
  1. No window popping up to tell you how the download is going.
  2. status bar in the konsole
However, it has the following disadvantes:
  1. Doesn't support all the URL types KDE has (try "wget fish://server/dir/file", for example)
  2. Doesn't work with KDE cookies and authentication mechanisms (try d'n'd from an authenticated site)
  3. Not everyone must have wget installed.
  4. It doesn't start with a 'k'
So, kfmclient it is.
My question is where are all these neat tricks documented? This is a classic 'scratch your own itch' feature programming.
Dominique Devriese announced a new version of Kig
KDE Interactive Geometry 0.5 released
-------------------------------------
The Kig team is proud to announce the 5th release of the KDE Interactive Geometry program Kig. This version adds a lot of new features, and further improves the User Interface.

Kig is the most intuitive Interactive Geometry program available (including commercial ones), and has most of the features that the competition has to offer.

These are the things that have changed with relation to Kig 0.4:
  • Much improved undo support. Almost everything you can do in Kig can be undone now..
  • Support for the importing of files in the KSeg file format, in addition to the KGeo and Kig file formats..
  • Add a full screen mode
  • Add support for a polar coordinate system
  • Multiline text labels
  • Optimise moving by a better selection of what objects to redraw
  • lots of less important fixes, ui improvements, and functionality enhancements...

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