Favorite KDE Tricks?

Nat asks: "Here I am, plowing along at work on an ancient machine, and thanking heavens for how much easier Open Source makes my life. In particular, I've ended up settling with KDE and its main tools due to its ability to be configured into a relatively fast and lightweight environment, despite its number of features and useful tricks. I have discovered a good few of those already, but would like to ask you guys for further illumination: what are your favorite KDE tricks?" "I am personally very fond of multi-key shortcuts, which I base on the otherwise useless Windows key: Win-A for fast access to my most used applications, Win-W for all window management operations, and so on. I have other time-savers like: KIOs for upload, download and remote edition of files over SSH, and for access to locate queries from right within any file dialog. I have many more; but what are yours?

Conversely, what non-KDE tricks make your daily work easier and faster? What currently non-existing tricks would you like to see implemented? What are the worst time-wasters you've encountered?"

Comments

Focus management!

[Mad Merlin]

One of my favourite things about KDE (or, more specifically, kwin) is the way it handles focus. In particular, it doesn't enforce that the window in focus must be the window on top. Using the default (at least they were default the last time I did a fresh install) KDE settings, scrolling the mousewheel can be used to change the the focus to the window you're scrolling in, but without changing it's z positioning. Furthermore, once you've given a window this state in this manner, you can interact with it normally without fear of it popping on top again, until you a) left click on the titlebar, or b) it loses focus (and then gains it again).

While a similar effect is possible by using focus-follows-mouse, it also requires you to keep the mouse cursor inside the window you want to have focus, whereas with this method, the mouse cursor can be anywhere.

In the same vein, the alt+(left|right) mouse button combos, which by default are mapped to moving and resizing a window, don't give a window focus either. Thus, you can move and resize any window without fear of it a) coming into focus or b) changing z order.

Re:Focus management!

[Mornelithe]

Configure -> Desktop -> Window Behavior

        "Focus" tab:
                Uncheck "Click raise active window"

        "Window Actions" tab:
                Left button: Set to "Activate & Pass Click" instead of "Activate, Raise & Pass Click"

Solved.

Things I do

[Bralkein]

I have heard a few people here and there complain that Konqueror is of no use to them as a file manager, because it is only single-pane. One thing I never noticed until recently is that Konqueror can actually have as many panes as you like! This is really useful. I have set up the hotkeys for splitting the view panes so that Alt-S will split to the side, Alt-D will split down and Alt-X closes the currently-selected pane. Now, normally I like using single-pane, but sometimes two or more can be easier. Whenever I need that, I use the shortcuts to do that. For example, since I use Konqueror as my browser too, I can go to a website with some images or files that I want, split the pane in two, navigate to my home directory in one of the panes, then it is as simple as dragging and dropping the items I want from the website to the folder.

For KDE apps that have functionality exposed via DCOP, you can tie mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts to DCOP calls using the dialogue found in Control Centre->Regional & Accessibility->Input Actions. For applications you use regularly, this can be really useful. There is a DCOP browser you can use to explore the things that you can do with DCOP-enabled applications. Have a play with it and see what you can do. I personally use it for controlling Amarok. (an amazing app for anyone who hasn't used it BTW)

Have you messed around with the storage media notification configuration? When this feature first appeared, I worried that it might be useless and annoying, all popping up dialogues when you insert a disc, but some of the stuff you can do with it is quite cool. For example, if you use an external hard drive to back up your data, you could add an option to do that on the notification. Then, when you plug the drive in, the notification will pop up, and all you need to do is choose the newly-created option to back up your data. The dialogue you can use to do all this is found in Control Centre->Peripherals.

I hope some of these suggestions are of use to someone, and I also hope that nobody I know ever reads this post, as it is by far the most disgustingly nerdy thing I have ever written.

ioslaves...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Someone else already mentioned fish:// (remote filesystem access over ssh). the audiocd:// ioslave is nice as well - put in a music cd, type "audiocd:/" into konqueror, and you get a "virtual" directory of WAV, MP3, and Ogg-vorbis files. Drag and drop and it automatically encodes them to "real" mp3/ogg/wav files as desired.

And, of course, k3b is one of the handiest GUI programs ever - normally my nerdly pride insists on using command line tools, but k3b is just too nice.