Well, the first feature for 4.3 is finished even before the final 4.2 is in your favourite distro’s repositories.

Before today, when you clicked ‘Switch User’ in Lancelot, it would use KRunner and query it with the magic word ‘SESSIONS’. That would show the KRunner results inside Lancelot.

Lancelot Sessions Old
Lancelot Sessions Old

There were a couple of problems with that approach:

  • The first was that it induced a bug when you try to invoke the ‘Switch User’ a couple of times in a row.
  • The second is that although ‘SESSIONS’ is a magic keyword, it doesn’t get only the responses from the session runner, but also from Strigi [for example], so it produced rather unpleasant results.
Lancelot Sessions Menu
Lancelot Sessions Menu

Why those two bugs weren’t fixed? Because I planned something a bit different for the ‘Switch User’ button, and, for that matter, the rest of the buttons. So the first step towards the goal has been done. Now, instead of loading the sessions inside the main list, you get a pop-up menu, as shown in the screenshot.

Next steps

Now, the next thing to do is to make a menu for the ‘Log Out’ button, and to make the buttons configurable. So, if you don’t have the use for ‘Lock Session’ or ‘Switch User’, you will be able to replace them with something different.

Enough for this time, cheerio!