Preamble: I have no intention to start a dispute related to the new applet browser in Plasma. Some people like it, some don’t, some prefer the old one, some want something completely different…
As you don’t already know :), Marco did some great work which I’m not gonna talk about - he said he’ll make a screencast of it eventually. So I’ll just mention a side-effect of that made possible by a 1-minute patch by yours truly.
KRunner (and Lancelot, naturally) as widget explorers
From KDE SC 4.5, you’ll be able to fire up KRunner or Lancelot, search for some plasma widget and drag it to the desktop.
Well, that’s all :)
Edit: You can also create a shortcut like Meta+P to open krunner with only this /plasma/ runner enabled via Global Shortcuts (thanks vilder for info)
I’m not going to make a detailed post, just a screen-shot based overview of the new features you can expect in KDE 4.5.
Cascading popups
There was a lot of talk in the beginning about why Kickoff and Lancelot are not like the classic menu - and don’t have popups. Although I still don’t consider cascading popups to be good, liblancelot supports them. After a large amount of polishing, the feature is ready to be exposed in the menu itself. It is considered experimental, but it works quite well.
How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Applications > Open popups for subcategories
This feature is not yet enabled for the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Parts) but it still may find its way into it for 4.5.
Smaller section buttons.
vs.
How to activate: Right-click any of the section buttons and choose “Make buttons narrower”
Search history
Lancelot now remembers what you have typed in the search box, and auto-completes your query.
How to activate: Start typing - the closest match will already be in the search box, grayed out a bit. To use the whole completion, press End key. For completing smaller parts, press right arrow key.
Search engines (runners) configuration
Now, you can choose which runners to enable and which ones to disable. You can disable the slow or crashy ones, …
First of all, I need to apologize for not doing this earlier - I was rather busy lately.
The other problem is that “remember the milk” plasmoid is ruining/spoiling me. Until I started using it, I somehow found the time to do stuff in order not to forget what I need to do. This way, when I have a reminder, I can postpone most of the items in it indefinitely. ;)
So, without a further ado, I present the first public release of the fantastic, greatest and uber-awesome brand-new (and did I say fantastic and awesome?) plasma theme named ASCII (it is awesome… and fantastic… and unique… and gorgeous… and uniquely fantastic… and awesome…):
There were two main problems with the Lancelot Part applet.
The first was the name. The name, although it does represent what the applet is technically, it doesn’t really say what the applet is meant for and what it does.
So, it is problematic when you see it in the applet browser, and it isn’t any better to see it when you drag and drop a folder onto the desktop and get the options to show it in the “Folder View” or “Lancelot Part”.
Configuration
]
The second problem was that a lot of users thought that Lancelot Part does nothing (aka doesn’t work) because when you add it by using the widgets browser, it is just an empty applet. (nobody really bothers reading the instructions these days).
Now, you can use the configuration dialogue to choose what you want to be shown in the applet.
Ideas
I’m currently having some problems wording a couple of things and I would appreciate any help you can give.
The first problem is what to put as a description for the Shelf applet. “Generic list which can hold various types of items” sounds really bad :)
The second is the title for the section of the configuration dialogue shown in the image above - the section below “show the search box” option where you can choose which /sublists/data models/ to show in the applet.
Internals
The ‘internal’ name of the applet (as seen in plasma*rc files) hasn’t changed to keep the back-compatibility without the need for hooks in the configuration system to tell plasma about the rename. The other thing I had to watch out while redoing a few things was to keep the old applet configuration structure intact. Surprisingly, I managed it somehow.
The applet’s source code is still located in kdeplasma-addons/applets/lancelot/parts but it will be moved to kdeplasma-addons/applets/shelf soon enough.