Is there a way to get a kde3 color scheme into kde4?

[Duncan]

James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> posted 4A67A812.2080603 at acm.org,
excerpted below, on  Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:00:18 -0700:

> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>>> Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>>>> James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>>>>> [The kde4 color scheme] is somewhat confusing.
>>>> [P]lease be more specific?

>>> First, I note that the KDE3 KCM has links from preview to the colors
>>> would be a great help.
>> 
>> Wow, it took forever to parse that.
> 
> Yes, part of that last sentence seems to have gone missing.

I couldn't parse it at all, here, but I decided I wasn't the intended 
audience, and maybe Matthew could parse it.  But it seems he had trouble 
too.  But part of the sentence missing explains it.  Sometimes my brain 
goes faster than my fingers, too. =:^s

What's worse is that I seldom see it when reading over it again, as my 
brain simply supplies the missing info as if it were there... often even 
with someone else's writing let alone my own.  On /. and etc, others will 
sometimes point it out, and I have to go back and reread and even looking 
for it, sometimes I have to read it again multiple times to catch the 
missing bit.  If that's happening with what others write, what hope at 
all do I have with my /own/ writing. =:^(

But it's nice to see I'm not the only one with the issue... either one. 
=:^P

>> I assume what you mean is how you
>> can click on the preview and have the corresponding color selected in
>> the list?
>> 
>> That would be nice, I agree. It's not coded yet :-(.

Matthew did a MUCH better job than I at that parsing, and just as amazing 
a job explaining it, and we all three agree it'd be nice.  But not coded 
yet is not coded yet...

>>> The "Color set" selections in "Colors" sections (other than "Common
>>> Colors") have two rows in the "Preview".  What do these two rows
>>> represent?
>> 
>> Background and Foreground. Top row is foreground roles against
>> NormalBackground. Bottom row is background roles, using the foreground
>> most likely to have worst contrast with that role. The background roles
>> (except Alternate, currently) can't be set individually; they are
>> calculated from the respective foreground colors plus NormalBackground.

Something else to code would be tooltips explaining all that... and since 
I'm asking for ponies already, how about a fancy harness to go with them, 
in the form of tooltips explaining the "a i ! - +" on the scheme tab and 
with common colors.  Once someone selects the colors tab and something 
other than common colors, with some thought, the idea sort of 
materializes, but it's far from intuitive, particularly for someone 
coming from kde3, who has never seen such a rich color model before.  Or 
putting it a bit differently, their purpose is almost as hard to parse as 
James' bit above. =:^P

>>> Do all the background colors shown exist?
>> 
>> They do; look at KColorScheme::BackgroundRole. Most of them aren't
>> often used, admittedly. (Or did you mean 'can they be individually
>> tweaked', in which case see above?)
>> 
> What I meant was do the colors have names.  I guess that the answer is
> no.

Well, the "exist, but not often used" bit /does/ answer a question I had, 
but hadn't asked.

Thanks to both of you for making this such a helpful thread.  It's just 
this sort of thing that someone could put into a "KDE4 for the power 
user" (or even maybe "for Dummies") book.  Like O'Reilly's "Running 
Linux", or the years ago (some other publisher) "Using MS-DOS" book, both 
of which were EXTREMELY useful books and EXTREMELY good investments for 
me.

<wandering off into software usage and development philosophy>

But of course the idea is to make it intuitive enough that googling a 
thread on an obscure mailing list, or buying a book about it, shouldn't 
be necessary.  But that of course takes code, and code takes a real human 
investing real time and thought.  KDE3's code may have been crufty on the 
back end, and arts had been a huge negative for years, but other than 
that, it had reached a pinnacle of functionality and practical usability 
that's almost unmatchable.  One of the problems kde4 has had is that of 
the younger brother, always trying to fill the GIANT shoes of his super-
achieving older sibling.  Those are HUGE shoes to fill, and frankly, kde4 
isn't there and won't be for some time (I'm not alone in predicting 4.5 
will finally close to match 3.5).  But that's not kde's fault, except 
that they developed such a close to perfection previous version that it's 
all but impossible to even /close/ to match it.

But it's little tweaks like we're discussing here that made kde3 what it 
was, and that have the potential to make kde4 just as good if not better. 
=:^)

-- 
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

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