[kde-linux] KDE 4. Trying to get it working like I need it to.

[Duncan]

Beso posted on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:27:44 +0100 as excerpted:

> you might alo try out kde4 native krusader. it has all the power of
> midnight commander and a lot of other better functions.

Thanks.  I thought about mentioning that.  But one of the big features of 
mc, for me, is that it works the same in a text term and in a konsole 
window on X/KDE.  That's important for a sysadmin tool that could well be 
needed to fix broken X/KDE configs themselves.  Yes, I could use both, 
but the consistency of the interface and of my mc user-menu extensions 
(which I've totally customized, tho a few of the entries are based on mc 
defaults, but I think I've customized more lines than not, by now) would 
be gone, and one quality that's very important for an admin tool to have 
is that the user is familiar enough with it so it's not adding any more 
stress to what might already be a stressful situation -- perhaps 
something important is broken and the admin task at hand is trying to 
find the problem and fix it, and that's stressful enough as it is, even 
when the use of the tools is so ingrained they seem to function as an 
extension of the admin himself.

Now it could well be argued that the krusader OFM interface should be as 
useful for non-admin activities as well, sorting images, etc, areas where 
an ncurses based text inferface don't work so well.  For some people, 
that's probably true.  However, in the user context, the (possibly 
multiple-window with drag and drop) tree and single dir approach 
popularized by MS Windows Explorer and seen in KDE's core tools such as 
dolphin, konqueror (in fm mode) and gwenview, seems to work well enough 
for me.

But regardless, it's very much a user preference thing, tho I /do/ expect 
the mc interface could be /extremely/ useful in helping users overcome 
their fear of the text interface and in making available an actually 
usable interface for configuration tasks where they'd otherwise be left 
at the all too scary CLI.  That, IMO, is where mc really shines, and 
where I first found it useful, tho once I started using it there, it very 
quickly became my preferred sysadmin task file manager and text editor on 
X/KDE as well.  Still, it's very much a "YMMV" type thing, perhaps even 
more so than most UI elements.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman