viability of implementing global shortcuts via KDED and DBus

[Lubos Lunak]

On Friday 11 of May 2007, Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> On Friday 11 May 2007 07:44:08 Thomas Zander wrote:
> > On Friday 11 May 2007 02:46:43 Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> > > I have recently reimplemented KGlobalAccel to implement proper global
> > > shortcut conflict resolution. To that end, every application has to
> > > have a list of all global shortcuts that has to be loaded from a global
> > > config file. This is neither space nor CPU efficient, especially at
> > > application startup time (bad!).
> > >
> > > It would be nice to have a KDED module that listens to keypresses like
> > > the current KGlobalAccel does and that also does the bookkeeping.
> > > As I have no DBus experience, there are some issues on which I am
> > > asking anyone with DBus/QtDBus knowledge for comments.
> >
> > I suggest turning it around; let the application query some global object
> > via dbus and get a list of conflicting keypresses only (low memory).
> > You should do this (shortly) after the app shown its window to avoid
> > network latency slowing down the startup, but my guess would be that it
> > would be faster than loading / parsing files from disk.
>
> OK, nice idea but not fully thought through, or I didn't get what you mean.

 I think what Thomas meant was that the conflict resolution should be handled 
by IPC, instead of parsing a config file all the time; it wasn't about where 
XGrabKey() should be done (where kded module would be a best place it seems).

> Erm by the way, can one rely on the presence of KDED, even when running a
> KDE application in another DE's session?

 Kdeinit (which also launches kded) can be started on-demand if needed. See 
e.g. KToolInvocation::klauncher().

>
> (*) Global shortcuts of applications that are not running should be
> remembered to protect them from conflicts, especially user made conflicts
> by shortcut editing. The old system cannot do this, which arguably needs to
> be fixed.

 Arguably. If I have both KSCD and Amarok and they both have 'Next track' 
global shortcut, should I really be prevented from using the same shortcut? 
Not that I really know the right answer.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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