One of the areas of Konsole which I really want to give a little love for KDE 4 is the terminal setup ( terminal features, colour schemes, display options, character encoding etc. ) and creation of profiles for different types of terminal.
To get a better idea of what users need from their terminal, I have set up a survey. There are 28 questions, all optional, and opportunities for additional comments at the end. Aside from helping me to understand how you use and set up your terminal, this also gives you a chance to prioritize a few features for KDE 4.
Please help improve Konsole by telling us about your needs and preferences. Completing the survey should only take 5-10 minutes of your time. Thank-you in advance.
Konsole Usage and Preferences Survey
On the subject of surveys, I had difficulty finding a good PHP-based survey system to use. I used phpESP in the end, but recommendations about alternatives would be welcomed.
Thanks to seele for checking the questions and spotting a few problems.
The current roadmap is to implement the new terminal setup facilities in the next month or so, and then merge the development branch into the main KDE 4 trunk. After much tidying up of loose ends, it will be ready for the feature freeze in June.
3 comments:
I'm writing this here instead of on the survey because it is a bit long, and maybe it is interesting for other people to read too.
I think that currently color schemes in terminal emulators are a bit of a mess. Let me explain what I mean. The way I think it is supposed to work is this:
The non-written standard is obviously white on black, because that is how "real" terminals are, so all programs can be expected to work right with that scheme; also, the colors used it that scheme are fairly standard.
So I think that in all schemes with dark background "intensive" colors should be light while not intensive colors should be dark (they don't have to look right with a dark color as background, while they should be readable on "intensive" colors). And until here that is exactly how it works, apart from intensive and non-intensive colors often being the same. But for dark text on light backgrounds for programs not having to care about the color scheme (and they really shouldn't) intensive colors should be dark and not-intensive colors light, "intensive (white)" should actually be black.
Here is a screeshot to see what I mean, from back when I used Gentoo and a light color scheme:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/images/1/18/KDE-nimatar.20050829.jpg
that's how I think it should look, with the default colors it would be barely readable
Unfortunately all terminals with light on dark color schemes use the "standard" color scheme with only e few colors changed. And what is worse, some programs have had to adapt to this, in same cases using background colors that are of the same type as the text (both intensive or both non-intensive) because they look okay with the standard colors.
If you use a light background using the previous rules, you have to check the option "set background=dark" in vim, which is, to say the least, non very nice (but if they expect you using those rules, they wouldn't need any option of that kind at all).
Maybe it is a bit late now to change things, but as a fact currently light colors schemes don't work very well, which is a pity.
If you too think it should be nice to solve this problem, I could try to contact other terminal emulator developers and of programs like vim who should change their behavior accordingly.
Maybe I could even try to contact freedesktop.org about it??
Where will the results be presented?
I'm really interested in this.
Thanks for making Konsole even better!
"Additional comments about Question 8:" (page 2)
Shouldn't this be "Additional comments about Question 7:"? ;)
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