Kickoff / ALI extensibility

Eike Hein hein at kde.org
Mon Mar 3 22:34:46 CET 2008


Moin,

in KDE 3, the default "ALI" KMenu was extensible by way
of C++ plugins supplying sub-menus to the "Actions" sec-
tion of the popup menu, along with UI to enable/disable
individual plugins. Some of the more useful plugins we
shipped in the core modules include the bookmarks sub-
menu and the quick access submenus for Konq, Kate and
Konsole sessions (the latter two I love dearly :-).

Some of those also used to be available as standalone
Kicker button applets. Plasmoids can take on those duties
just fine, but Kickoff and the traditional menu launcher
presently aren't extensible. One could argue that the
old functionality could be provided by Runners (some of
it already is) once Kickoff makes use of them, but Kick-
off tabs are better at some other things, such as showing
a full list of items at a glance and mouse navigation ra-
ther than keyboard input.

So, do we want public API to add new tabs to Kickoff? If
so, should that extend to submenus in the traditional
menu ALI as well, or is that a legacy thing confined to
basic functionality?

If we do want extensibility (I do ;), how can that be
achieved with minimal code duplication? Should Runners
be able to both provide matches to the search box and
lists to custom tabs? How would Plasmoids make use of
the same implementation -- should it be Data Engines
instead? (Makes me wonder about the demarcation line
between Runners and Data Engines down the road ...)

Thoughts?


-- 
Regards,
Eike Hein, hein at kde.org


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