Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Easter holiday terminal update

Quite a bit of progress in Konsole over the Easter holiday, summary of the best bits:

  • Began a re-write of the Konsole Part. Under KDE 3.x, the Konsole part and the main application duplicate a lot of code, and much of the functionality in the main application is not available in the part. The goal is to keep the Part and application specific portions of the code much smaller in KDE 4. This should make maintenance easier and also make many/most of Konsole's KDE 4 enhancements and new features available in Kate, KDevelop, Dolphin, Yakuake etc. using the part.

  • Implemented a Yakuake-style 'background mode' for Konsole. This means that a shell session is started in the background, which can be displayed or hidden instantly from anywhere by pressing a global shortcut ( currently hardcoded to F12, but eventually customisable ).

  • Improved the bookmark system. When creating a new bookmark, Konsole now chooses the working directory of the foreground program instead of just using that of the main shell (Useful if you nest shells or are running any interactive program in the shell) If the foreground program is SSH, this saves the current user and host as a special SSH bookmark. Oh, and I added 'Bookmark Tabs as Folders' support.

  • Allow the user to choose which custom sessions are shown in the main menu.

  • Allow the user to split the view left/right ( in addition to top/bottom ) and support as many views open at once as the user wants. Screenshot

  • Began work on the Konsole settings replacement.


So getting closer to merging the branch back into trunk for everyone to play with. I will do that once it is capable of creating new custom sessions and saving / loading the settings of session types.

Thanks also to everyone, all 8000+ of you, who took the time to complete the Konsole survey. Your feedback is much appreciated. I have summarised about 2/3rds of the results ( available here ) so far, and already this week I implemented a number of changes based on the results ( Background mode, SSH bookmarks ). There were many kind words for the developers ( past and present ), always appreciated :)

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

> Enjoy hardcore S&M/Develop Gentoo

You misunderstood that. Gentoo isn't about pr0n. ;-)

houshuang said...

I thought about this after taking the Konsole survey, and so I thought I'd mention it now. You talked about integration with different applications - here's one I'd really love to see and which would make a world of difference to me (although I have no idea if it's possible or feasible).

To me screen is the best thing since... fresh dark Norwegian bread (can't stand that sliced stuff :)), and I use it all the time, log in from multiple consoles, detach, never worry about processes stopping because my connection is broken etc. However, the one really annoying thing about screen is that you cannot scroll in Konsole...

I know you can use Screen's inbuilt functions to scroll-back, but when you're on a really slow connection and webrick just outputted three pages of backtrace, all you really want to do is to pull that scrollbar up quickly to see what just happened... The fact that I cannot do that often makes me choose to not use screen, or run a separate ssh without screen just for logging... which is really annoying.

No idea if it can be done elegantly, but if it could, it would be such a killer feature for me!

Thanks a lot
Stian

Anonymous said...

The one annoying thing still for me with Konsole is that it doesn't make HTTP/FTP URLs clickable. When using irssi, I have to select every link and then dump it in Konqueror, quite a hassle. There's a long-time bug on this as well, but doesn't seem to be moving anywhere. :(

Unknown said...

Clickable links probably will be supported in KDE 4.0. The aforementioned bug report has a lot of votes, so I will give it some time.

I have added support for 'filters' to Konsole. Each terminal display can have one or more filters attached to it. They process the text which is displayed and can mark regions as highlighted or a link with an action executed when clicked. Filters are also used for the incremental search feature to highlight matches for the user's query.

Clickable URLs are not there if you were to build SVN right now though.

Anonymous said...

8000+ respondents! that's a lot of surveys to sift through. You're doing a fantastic job in improving konsole based on feedback. i can't want to try it.

Unknown said...

Wish the bookmark system can also bookmark host(ssh server)'s port & default encoding. It's very useful for users who need manage many different host via ssh.

Anonymous said...

Rob, the link to the survey results is broken (404).
Otherwise, good work!

Anonymous said...

New location seems to be http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/konsole/developer-doc/research/konsole-survey-findings?revision=662161&view=markup

Mathieu said...

@Francis Giannaros

klipper makes this a breeze

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