How to use Plasmoid shortcuts

[Duncan]

Dotan Cohen posted on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:00:00 +0200 as excerpted:

> I have the Quick Launch plasmoid in a panel. I have set it a keyboard
> shortcut, but pressing that shortcut does not focus the plasmoid. How
> are these shortcuts to be used?

I don't claim any authority on this, but based on my observations...

Plasmoid keyboard shortcuts should make the plasmoid visible... bring the 
panel to the top or unhide it if it's hidden, etc.  (I'm not sure about 
desktop plasmoids, whether they trigger desktop activation or not, as I 
run a dual monitor setup with one as the "working" display which doesn't 
have much on it as it's often covered and the other as aux, generally 
uncovered already to a large extent -- maximize only maximizes to the 
active one, thus, to the "working" display in most cases.  Thus, I haven't 
really tried shortcuts on desktop plasmoids.)

What plasmoid shortcuts do beyond "make visible" appears to be individual 
plasmoid dependent.  For menu type plasmoids, the ones I have shortcuts 
attached to, it generally activates the menu (be that kickoff, the classic 
menu, whatever... I have both setup here as I use the classic menu for its 
bookmarks and kcontrol-applet menus, tho I don't actually use kickoff much 
except for apps I seldom use, as I have a scripted hotkey-launcher I use 
for most launching).  For many others, simply making the plasmoid viewable 
is the primary goal as they're primarily informational displays with 
limited interactivity.

I suspect that quicklaunch (which I don't normally use tho I played around 
with it for this post, because as I said my preferred method for launching 
frequently used apps is a scripted keyboard-shortcut based launcher, FWIW 
my own script), being primarily icon based interaction, doesn't do much 
beyond become visible when the shortcut is triggered.  In theory, it could 
"focus", allowing arrow-n-enter based navigation, triggering the 
individual icon launchers, but I'd consider it relatively unlikely that 
keyboard navigation implementation would be any sort of priority (other 
than "bluesky"), the assumption being that you use the right tool for the 
job, and while quicklaunch may indeed be a useful tool for point-n-click 
launching, it'd make a poor keyboard launcher even if the functionality 
was implemented.

So... if you're looking for a plasmoid (or other tool) to take focus and 
allow keyboard interactive launching... use something other than 
quicklaunch... and without active keyboard navigation implemented in 
quicklaunch, "make-visible" is about the best one can expect from a 
trigger shortcut assigned to it.

-- 
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

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.