New system buttons

One of the first requested features, even before the Lancelot brainstorm thread on KDE forums was to change the system buttons from Lock Session, Log Out and Switch User to something else because some users don’t use some of the buttons. Radically changing the Lancelot behaviour this late in its age of existence is something that can not be considered. But the users should have some freedom.

The point is that the buttons are now configurable. Open the configuration dialogue, and you’ll see a new section. Click any of the three buttons you see, and you’ll get a list of possible actions to assign to it.

Theme improvements

While developing the Spoons Lite theme, I realized that it is hard to make a transparent theme for L because the text becomes almost unreadable.

It was the same with Plasma panel befire, so the Plasma guys and gels made the text on the panel to have a shadow which improves readability. Now, all Lancelot widgets support this as well. It is off by default, unless the theme authors want to turn it on. The cool thing is that the theme authors can be selective and add shadows only on desired elements.

For example, in Spoons Lite (shown in the screenshot above) the shadow (or in this case a white glow since the text is black) appears only on system and section buttons, and not in the main part of the menu.

That’s all for now. There is another theme improvement, but we’ll talk about that later.

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.

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.

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!