It is the time to announce the new version of Lancelot that will be shipping with KDE 4.3.

Most software has code-names for different releases. Lancelot doesn’t, but I’ve decided to dedicate a new tagline to this version – “I just get carried away…”. It is still from the same motion picture as the last one (“In my own idiom” – for Lancelot 1.0).

The news of a new version can never be as grand as the introduction to a new program (especially when a lot of hype preceded it like it was the case for L1.0), so I’ll not bother to make it more grandiose than it is.

Themes

The first thing you’ll notice is that the themes have changed. All themes but Aya which kept its Spartan look.

You can see the Air theme in the main picture above, Slim Glow in the first screenshot and Aya in the second. The other “dark” themes such as Heron and Elegance look similar to S-G.

I’m aware that there will be complaints, so I’ll prepare a “classic” theme pack for the complainers.

Features

There are no ground-braking new features – most of them are related to configuration options. So, if you want to see what’s new in that area, just open the configuration dialogue.

A lot of small improvements have been made – finished keyboard support, some usability improvements, some fixes, better Kopete and KRunner integration, better Parts applet (ok, this one can be considered a grand improvement since the Parts applet has become useful yet again), sorting of the applications in the list according to the XDG specifications…

And, as a topping on a cake, the Contacts section now supports plugins, so you can write them for your favourite mail/chat application. This feature is hidden from the user, and will be until it stabilizes for KDE 4.4.

The continued development – for KDE 4.4

Since the known bugs are sparse (or to be exact, I have only one that I need to investigate), I have continued the real development in a branch in SVN (hard feature freeze is upon us, so I can not do that in the trunk). The liblancelot is now much lighter memory-wise – a couple of bytes per Lancelot::Widget (and that is a lot of bytes per Lancelot application), it is refactored and is a step closer to the API stability and maybe even ABI stability.

That’s all for now – I’m bored and I need to prepare for my talk about Free/Libre software and KDE that is due later today…

New features in the land of Lancelot

Keep open option – Lancelot doesn’t automatically close when you click something in it, but closes only when it loses the focus. You can set this option in the configuration dialogue, or you can hold Ctrl pressed while activating items in L.

The second thing is that the GMail plasma-lancelot DataEngine is working well and I’ve placed it in playground/plasma.

As you can see in the screenshot, it behaves differently than the Kontact engine in L – it shows a list of unread mails instead of the list of directories that have unread mails in them. The reason behind that is that I use GMail’s Atom feed to get the unread messages.

I have placed it in playground not because it is unfinished/unstable or anything, but rather because it is not intended for general use, and because there is no GUI for choosing the contact engines.

This post will be short, I’m tired.

One of the common feature requests was to make the categories shown in the applet customizable – that is, to have the possibility to choose which categories are shown. Well, starting from the current SVN version, you can.

If you don’t use the contacts or documents section, just don’t show them. You could make it show only the applications section thus making Lancelot more simple and more ‘traditional’.

Mind that this only affects the launcher applet itself, when the categories are shown inside it, and not the menu.

In other news…

… a couple of insects known as bugs were squashed, and VIDE the Vim IDE is progressing nicely – I’ve moved Lancelot development away from the Project.vim plugin and similar and started using only Vide plugins…

There are a couple more feature requests marked as FINISHED in Lancelot’s TODO file.

1. Wasted space

In previous versions of Lancelot, when using the no-click activation, there was some space between the lists while browsing the applications. The space was needed because of extenders and scroll-bars. Scroll-bars, obviously, still need the space like before, but the extenders don’t.

The initial proposal was to make the extender inside the list item itself, so it would be an /intender/, and not extender. This wasn’t that great idea since that would induce a lot of accidental activations – you hover the end of an item, the /intender/ pops right below the cursor, and since it is hovered, it activates.

The alternative was to allow the extenders to go outside the list, and that is exactly what is going on now. The extenders now can overlap the space of the neighbouring list. So, in a nutshell, the extenders from one list, and the scroll-bar of another are sharing the same space.

2. More than breadcrumbs

The second requested feature that was implemented today was to show the trail in the application browser, not only in the breadcrumb bar, but also in the lists. This worked before when using keyboard for navigation through the application browser (aka PassagewayView), but not when using the mouse. It now works for mouse too.

3. Why do I search for empty strings?

This one is the smallest change for today – instead of showing you the message ‘Search query is empty’, Lancelot returns to the Applications section.

UPDATE: I was too lazy to create another post… and not enough news for one.

4. I want to hide my tracks!

It is now possible to right-click and item in Recent Documents, and remove it, as well as to clear the whole document history.

5. Race the Dolphin through the hoops

There were a few requests to make Lancelot use Dolphin’s places. I thought it will be tricky to do that since L separates devices from places, but fortunately it was not the case. Dolphin stores the places information in a XBEL formated file (bookmarks format) and provides a nice distinction between the devices and places. Note that the places are not automatically reloaded. I could do that easily, but IMHO reserving an iNotify slot for just that would be a waste.

This also means that there is now a XBEL-based model for Lancelot. It doesn’t support bookmark folders, but it will eventually.

So, if you are following the kde-cvs-announce mailing list, you have seen this message about tomorrow’s changes that are bound to hit the SVN.

In a nutshell, when KDE 4.2.x is concerned, this means a couple of things:

• 4.2 is moving away from the trunk, and starts its life in its own branch.
• 4.2 is entering the last stage before tagging it as /final/

While this is great news for 4.2, it is even better for 4.3. This means that the SVN trunk is now exiting the /feature freeze/ state. This is a great thing for developers because the development becomes fun again (squashing bugs can not be labeled as fun), great for PlanetKDE readers since you’ll get real news from now on, and great for feature junkies for obvious reasons.

Lancelot 1.5

Lancelot’s version that will be branched tomorrow is the final 1.5. Compared to the one in beta 2 (1.4.9), it has a couple of bugs (that you haven’t noticed, if bugs.kde.org is to be consulted) fixed and is ready for prime-time.

Now the development of your suggestions can begin!