KIO slaves wizard

[Dik Takken]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

> and yet i constantly come across people who are above average to true power
> users who are blithely unaware of our ioslaves.

I was one of those users who was thinking that any URL starts with either 
file:/ , http:// or ftp://. I guess all former Windows users think 
that way, because Windows knows no other URL types. For me, this changed 
when I saw a tar:/ URL some day, which made me wonder what other sorts of 
URL exist in KDE. Then I discovered audiocd:/ and I was completely amazed.

Yes, I heard about KIO slaves before then, but somehow I was thinking that 
they were meant to be used by application developers only. How wrong I 
was.. :)

Has anyone around here been playing with the idea to construct a VFS like 
GNOME and Windows have? That would enable users to use at least some KIO 
slaves without having to know what URL to type.

Short example: Besides "Personal Files", "Fonts", "Settings", "Devices" 
and so on, the VFS could contain an item called "Remote Computer". 
Clicking on this item asks the user to specify the computer's hostname 
(and possibly a username/password). After the user has given the 
hostname, the remote computer will be probed to see which protocols it 
supports, and the associated KIO slaves will be listed. The user can 
simply browse the remote computer's files, web pages, and so on by 
clicking on the items 'Browse web pages on this computer' or 'browse 
files on this computer', which will load the appropriate KIO slave for 
browsing.

Cheers,

Dik