[Konsole-devel] Konsole development

[Robert Knight]

Hello,

> Annoyed by some Konsole issues I started looking
> into the source and to send some patches

Thanks for that.  I haven't had a whole lot of time that
I can spend on Konsole lately as work keeps me pretty busy.

> My goal is to get Konsole more closely to what Dolphin
> provides, e.g. to have a more fresh and simplified look.

For me the most important things are that Konsole starts and feels fast,
has minimal UI clutter, good defaults and straightforward configuration,
so a "fresh and simplified look" sounds appealing - though some
prototype before/after screenshots would be useful to clarify what you
have in mind.

> Use standard KDE configuration (KConfigXT):
> Konsole's profiles are nice but the config dialog and menu/actions are
> horrible. Therefore port that to KConfigXT and use propper dialogs.

I'd like to see some UI mockups before I can I say much on this.  From
the users'
point of view what it looks like is much more important than how it works.

Regarding the menu/actions - what did you want to change here?

> Remove broken splitter stuff (completely):
> It's broken, simply. Playing around with splitter stuff reveals truckloads of
> bugs and I doubt that this feature is really useful. Thus, away with it.

Can you provide some examples of the bugs you mentioned?  I still have
a use for the
split view feature, so I'm not in favor of removing it entirely.  Code
was written
to support hierarchical splits which was ultimately never implemented
completely -
that could be removed.

> Not directly related to the other issues but Konsole's source could be
> improved too. For example a consistent coding style or some reorganization of
> the source tree to make it easier to hack on it.

Specifically what did you have in mind?

Regards,
Robert.

On 3 March 2010 16:14, Kurt Hindenburg <kurt.hindenburg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Sascha Peilicke <sasch.pe at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'd like to discuss some things regarding Konsole development. From your
>> activity on konsole-devel and the commit log, I assume that you're the
>> current
>> maintainer. Annoyed by some Konsole issues I started looking into the
>> source
>> and to send some patches. Originally my motivation was to fix all that
>> little
>> UI glitches that Konsole has currently. The more I dug through the code I
>> realised that it could actually benefit from a major rewrite of some of
>> it's
>> UI components. My goal is to get Konsole more closely to what Dolphin
>> provides, e.g. to have a more fresh and simplified look. So, I'd like to
>> receive some input/thoughts about what I want to get done:
>>
>> Change custom tabbar/view stuff to ktabwidget:
>> This means fixing all the View* classes, there's a lot of code-bloat there
>> that was already solved elsewhere (like KTabWidget).
>>
>> Use standard KDE configuration (KConfigXT):
>> Konsole's profiles are nice but the config dialog and menu/actions are
>> horrible. Therefore port that to KConfigXT and use propper dialogs.
>>
>> Remove broken splitter stuff (completely):
>> It's broken, simply. Playing around with splitter stuff reveals truckloads
>> of
>> bugs and I doubt that this feature is really useful. Thus, away with it.
>>
>> Align menubar/actions to resemble other KDE applications more closel:
>> Some advanced stuff like scrollback is currently found in the menu. It
>> would
>> actually suffice to move this into the configuration. Same thing for all
>> the
>> QActions related to profile editing/changing.
>>
>> Code reorganisation:
>> Not directly related to the other issues but Konsole's source could be
>> improved too. For example a consistent coding style or some reorganization
>> of
>> the source tree to make it easier to hack on it.
>> --
>> Kind regards,
>> Sascha Peilicke
>> http://saschpe.wordpress.com
>
> Hello,
>   Actually Robert is the current maintainer and he is responsible for the
> Qt4/KDE4 version as he mostly rewrote it from Qt3/KDE3.  I do commit a lot
> of fixes and features and other general upkeep.
> Patches are always welcomed as there are very few people working on Konsole
> ATM. In general, throw stuff up on reviewboard.kde.org under the Konsole
> group (which sends it to the konsole ml).
>  Wholesale changes and features removals/additions will need some review and
> comment.
>  Thanks,
>     Kurt
>