[PATCH]: Kicker find as you type

[Dominik Seichter]

Hi,

Am Monday, 2. May 2005 09:52 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Sunday 01 May 2005 02:08, Dominik Seichter wrote:
> > To find the application, I simply search the name, comment and executable
> > name of all services.
> >
> > A screenshot can be found here:
> > http://krename.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kicker_01.png
>
> nice ... i believe there is a wishlist request for such an item on b.k.o...
> at first glance, something seems ... hrm.. amis.. i'm not completely sure
> what it is right now, but it seems to be in the wrong place.
I agree that it would be nicer in the main menu, I was not sure how to do that 
though.

> <think outloud mode>
> almost like i expect it to be in the _main_ menu, not a submenu. perhaps up
> in the "recent apps" area? hrm.
I do not quite understand. You want the search line edit to be visible above 
the recent app items. If no search string is entered, the recent application 
shall be shown and otherwise the search result?
This would be IMHO confusing to the user.

I can imagine another possibility: Below the "recent apps" block, we could add 
a "quick find" block. Default is 4 empty entries. If the user enters a search 
we display the 4 best matching items. The fixed size is necessary to prevent 
menu resizing (which does indeed not look so nice). The problem with this 
solution is that we would make the large kmenu even larger and that the 
search result is limited to only 4 items.

> or perhaps in the Applications section, and have it whittle down the
> options so the user can learn where things are as well? (not sure how i
> feel about that, actually)
Maybe this is the best choice to go. Add a find widget to the main menu and 
show only the items matching the users request.  Some work would have to be 
done to prevent menu resizing in this case.
One could even implement it directly in PanelServiceMenu (of course with a 
flag to offer the search functionallity only if wanted).

> and it seems to have some overlap with the exec applet as well. as in: this
> functionality would be nice for the exec applet =)
Yes, this would of course be nice for the exec applet, too. I do not have any 
idea right now, how the exec applet would look like with this feature.

> > Now I would like to know, how this feature can be further improved and
> > wether I should commit it to CVS or not.
>
> to be included in CVS it must follow the coding guidelines found in the
> HACKING file.
Of course.... cleaned up the code. Should be ok now.

> second, if it is a kpanelmenu subclass, it should be in kicker/menuext
> (yes, a bad name for that directory =) and be made into a loadable module.
> that way it will also appear in the Special Buttons menus and won't require
> any more of those ugly menu-specific hacks in k_menu.cpp nor will it add
> more clutter to kickerSettings.
I did that for now. Get the tarball from 
http://krename.sourceforge.net/data/kicker/quickfind.tar.gz and extract it to 
kdebase/kicker/menuext/ . Afterwards you have to add quickfind to the SUBDIRS 
list in kdebase/kicker/menuext/Makefile.am . I cannot create an updated patch 
right now, as I cannot connect to the cvs server for some reason and do a cvs 
diff :(. I guess I'll wait for tomorrow and do a svn diff ;)

> this means, however, either ditching it updating the Recent Apps list or
> (preferably) abstracting that out to somewhere in libkickermain so
> everything can use it.
Maybe I could a method (or class - don't know):
KService::List findMatchingServices( const QString & pattern );
Is this sensible? Where should it go?

> and this way, we can put this item in a playground to start with until we
> figure out exactly what to do with it ... the menuext's we have there right
> now really need some sorting out in general.
I think I'll try out some stuff this week and hope to figure out how this can 
be improved. Up till then, the menuextenstion is already a nice addition 
IMHO.

CU Dom
-- 
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Dominik Seichter - domseichter at web.de
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