The original Lancelot icon is usually considered weird-looking when seen on a panel (or desktop). Even I have had Lancelot set up not to use it.

I like the old icon very much, and I’m still proud I succeed in making something like that with a vector-graphics program (Inkscape) so it still is, and will be until the end of time, the main icon of the Lancelot project. But from now on, it will not be used for the applet button.

Now, the default icon is the standard KDE icon - the same one other launchers use.

For those of you who want to have a normal-looking icon but still want others to see that you are using Lancelot and not something else, you can use the following one:

The new icon can be set through the applet configuration dialogue.

There was a wish once upon a time to make the section buttons in Lancelot smaller, that is narrower, because people thought that they waste too much space.

At first, I was reluctant since I didn’t see the point in doing it, but I changed my mind recently - Lancelot is pretty much feature-complete as it is (at least from my point of use/view), so I decided to implement something that I absolutely have no use for, but somebody else will. The fact that I’m missing the vertical tabs in Amarok could be another reason in making this :)

So, if you want to have the buttons as shown in the following image, just right-click them and choose the appropriate* option. (mind that this is available in trunk, not in the KDE SC 4.4).

*It says ‘toggle collapsed sections’ at the moment, but I’ll change it as soon as I think of a better name.

Just to notify you of a big recent (committed today to trunk) change in Lancelot’s theming.

The items in the lists (ActionListView widget) now shouldn’t have a background - the standard background from Plasma (widgets/viewitem.svgz - the one you see in krunner, folder view, SAL…) is being used.

The only item that is excluded from this rule is the [Group-ActionListView-Categories] which is used for sublist headers (like ‘Recent documents’ inside the Documents section).

If you don’t remove the backgrounds, both backgrounds will be shown on mouse hover.

In order to adapt your theme to the new change, edit all sections in theme.config file that match [Group-ActionListView-*] and replace:

    background.type=svg
    background.svg=...something...
with:
    background.type=none

That’s all.

This change will become active in KDE 4.5 so you have a lot of time to adapt. Cheerio!

Another zsh-related post. This one is about defining a function that will allow you to define aliases for directories so that you don’t need to type something like ‘cd /this/is/a/very/long/path/in/the/filesystem’, but only ‘cdb some-alias’ (cdb - Change Directory with Bookmarks)

You can copy the script to your .zshrc, or create a zsh module as described in my previous post

# Module: Change directory with bookmarks
# path: bin/zsh-modules-available/cdbookmarks

function cdb_edit() {
  vim ~/.cdbookmarks
}

function cdb() {
  NewDir=`egrep "^$1<TAB_KEY>" ~/.cdbookmarks \
     | sed 's/^.*<TAB_KEY>//'`;
  echo cd $NewDir
  cd $NewDir
}

function _cdb() {
  reply=(`cat ~/.cdbookmarks | sed 's/<TAB_KEY>.*$//'`);
}

compctl -K _cdb cdb

That’s it. To define the bookmarks, create a file named ~/.cdbookmarks and the bookmarks in the following format:

(no spaces)

Cheerio!

My .zshrc became is too long to maintain it easily. I’ve decided to take the idea behind apache configuration in Debian and to split the .zshrc parts into easily maintainable subscripts. I have no idea if ZSH supports this in some vim-like form of .zsh/plugins, so I did it manually.

Preparation

The first step is to create the following directories

$ mkdir -p ~/bin/zsh-modules-available
$ mkdir -p ~/bin/zsh-modules-enabled

and to make a backup of old .zshrc like this

mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.backup

Setup

Open the ~/.zshrc file with your favourite editor, and copy the following into it (replacing the old code):

# Lines configured by zsh-newuser-install
source /etc/profile

for file in ~/bin/zsh-modules-enabled/*; do
    source $file
done

Splitting up

Now, open .zshrc.backup file we created earlier and split it into modules which you’ll save into ~/bin/zsh-modules-available. You can split it up any way you want. For example, one of the modules could be the following:

# Module: Aliases
# path: bin/zsh-modules-available/aliases
alias :q=exit
alias la='ls -A --color'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias f='find -name '
alias df='df -h'
alias gg='ack-grep'

Enabling modules

The last step is to choose which modules you want enabled, and to specify the order of execution by prefixing the names with a number from 00 to 99.

Go to the ~/bin/zsh-modules-enabled and do the following for the modules you want to enable:

ln -s ../zsh-modules-available/module-name ./xx_module-name

That’s all folks

So, you have a easily maintainable ZSH module system - it is easy to add a new one, to delete an old one, easy to switch them off or on… You could even create functions such as zsh_module_enable/disbable, but I’m too lazy for that. (aka, if you do, please post them in the comments section and I’ll add them to the post.

Cheerio!