[kde-doc-english] Competition entry

Thu Sep 30 22:35:15 CEST 2004

<!-- Arrr, doubling my chances :) -->

<title>Configuring Toolbars</title>

Nearly every KDE application has one or more toolbars at the top of the 
application window, underneath the menu. The toolbar contains icons (toolbar 
buttons) that represent commonly used actions and configuration settings. The 
KMail window, for instance, has a toolbar that contains buttons for "New 
Message," "Check Mail" and several others. Each of these actions is something 
you do often, so that is why they have toolbar buttons as well as menu 
entries (New Message is under Message->New Message, Check Mail is File->Check 
Mail).

Not everybody agrees on what actions are commonly used, though, ( I never use 
the New Message toolbar button or the menu item, I use the keyboard shortcut 
Ctrl-N). To ensure that your screen isn't cluttered with things you don't 
need, each toolbar can be customized. Additionally, you can usually customize 
which toolbars are displayed and how, as well.

<sect1><title>Customizing Toolbar Displays</title>

The easiest thing to customize with the toolbars of any given application is 
whether they are displayed at all. Most applications have a 
Settings->Toolbars menu where you can select which toolbars are displayed and 
which are not. Konqueror has four toolbars, Main, Extra, Location and 
Bookmark. It can be convenient to turn off the Bookmark toolbar to save 
screen space. To do so, click on the Settings menu, choose Toolbars, and then 
uncheck the Bookmark Toolbar entry (do this just by clicking on the menu 
item).

If there is no Settings menu, you can also right-click on the toolbar itself, 
and choose the Toolbars sub-menu from the resulting context menu.

The same toolbar context menu, accessed by right-clicking on the toolbar, 
allows you to customize other properties of the toolbar:

* Its orientation, so that instead of appearing at the top of the window under 
the menu bar you can place it on the left, right or bottom of the window.
* Its orientation, so that the toolbar "floats" as a separate window which you 
can move independently.
* Its orientation, so that the toolbar is squashed into a little flat grip 
that you can re-open by double-clicking on it (this is subtly different from 
making the toolbar vanish completely, since it it easier to cause it to 
re-appear).
* The appearance of text alongside, underneath, or instead of the icons on the 
toolbar.
* The size of the icons (if they are not supplanted by text).

</sect1>

<sect1>

<title>Customizing the Icons on the Toolbar</title>

The toolbar is intended for actions that you perform often, so what do you do 
if there is some useless icon there, like "cut"? Or what if you really want a 
"cut" button on the toolbar, but the application doesn't give you one? This 
is where the customize toolbars dialog comes in -- it give you complete 
control over the actions that are available on each toolbar.

Choose Settings->Configure Toolbars from the application's menu, or Configure 
Toolbars from the context menu of the toolbar itself.  This displays the 
configure toolbars dialog, which consists of a combobox <!-- drop-down box? 
--> with which you can select <emph>which</emph> toolbar to customize, and 
two lists of items -- one of the available actions, and one of the actions 
that are already in use on the toolbar.

Often there are many many more actions available ( activate tab #12, for 
instance) than you would ever want on the toolbar, or even that you know 
exist in the application. The customize toolbar dialog can be a learning 
experience. You can drag actions from one list box to the other, rearrange 
the items on the toolbar , or change the icon for a selected action. This 
allows you to drag the actions you don't want off of the toolbar and into the 
list of available actions; similarly, the actions you do want can be dragged 
into the toolbar. Clicking OK in the dialog immediately updates the toolbar 
with your new preferred actions.

There are a few special items that can end up in the listbox for the current 
toolbar: 

* separators, which exist in two flavors, --- line separator --- and --- 
separator ---. These provide a little spacing and visual separation on the 
toolbar. 

* &lt;Merge&gt;, which is a special item that allows plugins and other 
loadable components of the application to insert their actions into the 
toolbar as well. It is generally not a good idea to remove this, since you 
cannot get it back.

* ActionList:, these appear in various flavors (there is a viewmode_toolbar 
one in Konqueror) and again these represent lists of actions that might be 
inserted by plugins.

Whenever you click on an action in the list of current actions, a description 
of it is shown in the dialog. This description will warn you if it is a bad 
idea to remove the action.

If you do not like to drag things around, there are four buttons in the middle 
of the dialog which allow you to move the selected action from one list to 
the other, and to move a selected current action up or down in the list.

There must be a way to restore the default toolbars in an application, in 
order to recover from accidentally deleting an important action like 
&lt;Merge&gt;, but I don't know what it is.

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