New runner: Global shortcuts

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On April 19, 2010, Eduardo Robles Elvira wrote:
> I'm proud to announce a new runner available in playground, which
> search and activates global shortcuts. This  runners has some
> "conflicts" with other runners (same action gotten from another
> runner), for example now if I type "log out", I get three matches:
> "Log out" (from globalshortcuts), "Log Out" (duplicated, from another
> runner), and "log out without confirmation". What could we do about
> this?

these aren't, technically, conflicts but rather different runners all 
returning matches to the same query. aka exactly what krunner is supposed to 
do.

the various runners simply need to work together.

we can't simply remove the "log out" from the sessions runner because we don't 
know if there is a global shortcut for log out. so that's not an option.

i think you'll run into these kinds of problems with the global shortcuts 
runner repeatedly. i'd suggest adding some sort of trigger word so that the 
runner can know that the user is actually trying to trigger a shortcut. or 
require that the shortcut owner's app name is also provided. the rational for 
such a change is that when i type "log out" i mean "log out", not "find me 
shortcuts for logging out"; the same would apply for any other such item.

in the past we've discussed ideas around being able to chain runners, or to 
get notified when matches appear so that the list of matches offered by a 
runner can be modified in response to other runners ... it all ends up 
sounding like an awesome way to create race conditions and funny loops, 
though.

so we either "put up with" multiple returns or we use trigger words/phrases to 
access matches that are not so obviously "the answer the user wants" on a 
"naked" query term.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks