Remove "Send to" entries from Ksnapshot

[Duncan]

Dotan Cohen posted on Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:47:29 +0200 as excerpted:

> How does one remove entries from the Ksnapshot "Send to" feature? I only
> ever send to Kolourpaint, and I must have over 20 entries in there. That
> makes it difficult to find Kolourpaint, and the dialogue takes almost 4
> seconds to open.
> 
> This is KDE 4.7 on Kubuntu. Thanks.

Based on the list I have here, with a similar number of entries and 
taking a similar time...

There appear to be two classes of entries in ksnapshot's sendto menu:

1) Applications associated with images.  (jpeg, png, etc, I didn't 
investigate that far, but this set is the same list that appears in the 
open with list for various images.)

Here, this list is relatively short, and based on the open-with behavior, 
can't be what's delaying the menu, which is good, since this set is where 
kolourpaint appears.

2) All the kipi-plugins based entries.  kipi-plugins is normally an 
optional package consisting of various image-targeted utilities, feature 
enhancements, and integrated site-posting options.  When installed, it 
adds its set of options to several kde image-targeted apps, including 
digikam, gwenview, IIRC krita, and, it would appear, ksnapshot.

This definitely adds a huge number of entries to the list, and is 
probably what's taking the time to load, since the plugin design is 
modular run-time linking to avoid build-time linking that would force a 
hard dependency for any apps built against it.  The tradeoff for making 
it run-time optional, however, is that the whole list is scanned and 
added at load-time.

Here, gwenview is about the only app I use kipi-plugins in.  I don't have 
digikam installed, only exceedingly rarely use ksnapshot, and while I 
needed an image utility with alpha-channel handling and thus had krita 
installed for awhile, I finally gave up on it as EXTREMELY unintuitive 
and lacking the necessary documentation to work around that, in favor of 
the gimp, which is both MUCH more intuitive (you read complaints about 
it, but krita was MUCH worse for me, for sure) AND actually has quite a 
bit of reasonably good documentation, as well.

Even in gwenview, tho, I generally only use one kipi-plugin, the OpenGL 
image viewer plugin.  All those export/upload to some-site options are 
generally useless without an account on said site, and said account is 
more or less useless unless you have a digital camera of some sort and/or 
are an image-artist, generating your own content.  I don't even have a 
cellphone, the most common digital camera these days, and am not an image-
artist, so...

In gwenview, tho, while the initial kipi-plugin load takes some time when 
it's first triggered by opening the plugins menu, gwenview apparently 
caches the results, and subsequent usage of that menu is as real-time as 
one normally expects of a menu.

Unfortunately, it appears ksnapshot doesn't implement this sort of 
caching, as a second click of the sendto menu results in the same sort of 
wait as the first one did!  OUCH!

Anyway, take a look at the gwenview plugins menu, and any other places 
you might use kipi-plugins in kde-based image apps, and see if you 
actually use any of them.  Since the kipi-plugins package is normally 
optional (I've no idea what kubuntu does with it, tho) and because the 
set is all "extra" functionality, you will very possibly find that you 
don't use any of it, and can safely uninstall the entire package.

Meanwhile, here on Gentoo there's what's called install-mask.  If I 
really decided I didn't want the various individual plugins installed, I 
could easily mask them, leaving only the one I actually use, the opengl 
image viewer, to install.  However, that wouldn't lessen the build-time 
as the whole package would still be built, just parts of it wouldn't be 
actually installed, due to the mask.  If I wanted to avoid the build as 
well, I could probably customize the ebuild to build just the plugins I 
wanted, and the ebuild already makes some of them (generally the stuff 
with other external dependencies) optional and I have many of those 
already turned off, but customizing the ebuild sounds like more work than 
simply letting the system over-build and just masking what's installed.

Hope it helps.  I expect that if you do uninstall kipiplugins, you'll not 
only lighten that menu quite a bit, but make it much faster as well, 
since kde's normal sycoca (system config cache) infrastructure caches 
file associations, etc, so populating the menu from that only should be 
MUCH faster.

Alternatively, simply don't use the sendto menu.  Instead, use either 
copy, open kolourpaint and paste, or use save-as, and then either open 
(if kolourpaint is your top app priority for that imagetype) or open-with 
on the saved file and select kolourpaint.  I think I've used both of 
those options, but don't believe I've ever used the sendto menu (or if I 
did it was before kipi-plugin integration), as I was both quite surprised 
to see that whole kipi-plugins list myself, and nearly fooled into 
thinking the thing wasn't responding, since that menu took so long to 
load, and unlike the gwenview plugins menu, it didn't popup a temporary 
"loading..." placeholder.

-- 
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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