[Konsole-devel] Konsole development

[Sascha Peilicke]

> > 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.
Difficult, I'm too bad at drawing things. What I have in mind is like the 
dolphin configuration dialog which can be reached via "Configure Dolphin...". 
On the left we could then have categories like "General", "Profiles", 
"Scrollback", "Advanced", etc. The current Konsole "Edit Prifle" dialog 
actually mixes Konsole-wide settings and Session-settings and it does not 
allow to restore default values.

 
> > 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?
Like I wrote, most of the 'scrollback' stuff is actually settings and belongs 
into a configuration dialog. Same thing for profile management. Some action 
rearrangement, most KDE apps put 'Show Menu Bar' and 'Full Screen Mode' in the 
'Settings' menu

> > 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.
I attached some screenshots which show some issues. IMHO all the View* related 
classes are just to complex. A simple KTabWidget (which is similar to 
TabbedViewContainer) would suffice here. StackedViewContainer is a KTabWidget 
with only one tab, ListViewContainer seems to be unused. ViewSplitter 
functionality could be done like this:

KTabWidget
 |      |
Tab1   Tab2
 |      |
View   View       (That 'View' could be splittable horizontally/vertically)

> > 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?
the src/ tree is currently flat and lots of *.src files have more than one 
class inside or aren't even named after the class(es) inside. Therefore I'd 
like to rearrange things a bit:

* One class Foo per foo.h/foo.cpp pair
* Deeper source tree with like this:

src/                            // with only main.cpp
src/kpart                       
src/core                        // e.g. all low level stuff shared by the app 
and part
src/gui/
src/gui/dialogs
src/gui/widgets
src/gui/config          // KConfigXT stuff


-- 
Sascha Peilicke
http://saschpe.wordpress.com
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