If anybody tells you that KDE SC 4 is too fancy and not configurable enough, just show them this:

A product of a temporary idle mind – ASCII theme for Plasma…

edit: It’s is creating a wallpaper to fit this…

Just to notify you of a big recent (committed today to trunk) change in Lancelot’s theming.

The items in the lists (ActionListView widget) now shouldn’t have a background – the standard background from Plasma (widgets/viewitem.svgz – the one you see in krunner, folder view, SAL…) is being used.

The only item that is excluded from this rule is the [Group-ActionListView-Categories] which is used for sublist headers (like ‘Recent documents’ inside the Documents section).

If you don’t remove the backgrounds, both backgrounds will be shown on mouse hover.

In order to adapt your theme to the new change, edit all sections in theme.config file that match [Group-ActionListView-*] and replace:

background.type=svg
background.svg=...something...

with:

background.type=none

That’s all.

This change will become active in KDE 4.5 so you have a lot of time to adapt. Cheerio!

Just as a note, since Air is now the default theme for Plasma (and what’s worse, it is even called “default” instead of “air”), you’ll see that the Lancelot themes in 4.3 RC are screwed up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fix this before 4.3 RC tagging today (I was too late to discover the issue in the first place).

It is fixed both in the trunk and in the 4.3 branch, but, as I said, not on the time. So, just that you know, it is already fixed and all will be well in final 4.3.

Air Theme

So, since Air is coming along nicely (thanks Nuno), it was the time to make the files Lancelot needs for it. Although there are a few things yet to do, I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m even using Air as my Plasma theme now.

Scroll-bars

The second thing that all theme makers that support Lancelot should know, is that Lancelot now uses Plasma’s scroll-bars. So, you don’t need to make files for scroll-bars anymore.

Keyboard support

Lancelot in KDE 4.2 introduced keyboard support. Now it is taken even further – now you can do /anything/ in L by using only the keyboard. The section and system buttons now can be accessed through standard accelerators (Alt + the underlined letter). For opening the context menu for an item in the menu, select it and press Alt+Enter.

KRunner actions

As you should already know, runners can now support various actions for results. You can access them in Lancelot via a context menu. Well, that was the good news, the bad is that I know not of any runner that provides any special actions.

Other things

There is now a logging system that remembers applications you launch, what you search for etc. Some new configuration options are also present, and the parts applet works better. There are probably other changes, but I can not remember them at the moment.

So, cheerio!

Hi all!

I have heard that there are a few users unsatisfied with the Parts applet.

• “It [when placed in panel] is not transparent even when I use a transparent theme”, yelled one.
• “I can not resize it [when placed in panel]!”, cried another.
• “I want it to show the pictures of naked ladies”, complained the third one.

Well, to you all, I can only say “Rejoice! The solution is here!”. (the third one was able to rejoice a long time ago thanks to the Picture Frame applet)

The parts applet is now based on the Plasma::PopupApplet just like most other applets including the device notifier (Plasma::PopupApplet did not exist when the Parts applet was developed – it was introduced along with Plasma extenders). You can see what it looks like in the left screenshot.

It has some bugs at the moment, but will be polished in time for 4.3.

A new theme feature

This is the one new theme feature that I’ve mentioned before, but never got the chance to make a screenshot to post it here. It’s a new option for Lancelot theme makers (works both in the menu and the applets).

I find it impractical and ugly, but there were some requests to allow Lancelot Parts to look more like MacOSX stacks (is that the name?), so I made it. Just set the background.type=color-compact for the items you want to have this type of background.

I just wanted to brag about my new blog theme. It was heavily inspired by the new DOT design (made by Philip Tyrer and Nuno Pinheiro), but is done in a bit /different mood/

The second thing is that Identi.ca is now my primary microblogging service which you can see in the box on the right. Twitter will be updated simultaneously because I’ve set Identi.ca to pass the posts to it, so there’s no need for you to follow me on both places (if you’re not already).

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.

Hi all!

First I would like to point out that there are two new Plasma themes on kde-look. Well, at least two *my* new themes. Or to be even more precise, there is one new theme and one old that is new. Or new that is old. Or one theme… OK, I’ll stop now.

One of the themes is Spoons, which is now named Spoons Original, and is currently the oldest Plasma theme in existence (that’s why I couldn’t really say that there is a new theme on kde-look).

The other one is a sibling, possibly the younger sister of the aforementioned. The reason I have never used Spoons as my theme (as my Plasma theme, that is – it serves perfectly as the theme for my blog) is that it is too bold and eye-poking. So, the slimmer one was born. This is the first theme that I think could replace Slim Glow on my computer.

The main difference between Slim Glow and Spoons Lite is that the former helps the widgets on the desktop to be placed on the sidelines – not to draw attention, while the later helps them to be in focus, but still not to be too invasive.

Qt 4.5 and Lancelot

There have been issues when running Lancelot on systems with Qt 4.5 (or 4.4.4 snapshots) installed. Mainly, the Applications section was empty. Or, rather not empty, just appeared as it is – you could use the keyboard to /blindly/ browse the applications. It is now a thing of the past (at least when 4.5 is concerned – haven’t tested 4.4.4). It is now fixed in trunk and it works for all testers at bugs.kde.org.

The interesting thing is that L behaved differently when compiled against 4.4 and ran under 4.5 than when compiled under 4.5.

Qt bug

Fortunately enough, while fixing this, I’ve found a hack that I made a long time ago to bypass a Qt bug that I forgot to report when I initially encountered it (before KDE 4.1 was released). So, I’ve sent the report to the Trolls and I hope it will not go in the ‘we intended it this way’ pile.

Lancelot news

Apart from fixing bugs related to the Qt 4.5, there are some new cool things in Lancelot and its theming mechanism. I will leave it for some other time since this post is already a long one. And I need to make screenshots first.

So, stay tuned.

p.s. And merry new Lenny

Since I have received so many complaints because “Lancelot doesn’t follow/obey/… Plasma theme”, and I am tired of pointing the people to the FAQ, I decided to make the necessary files needed by Lancelot for all Plasma themes that ship with plasma-addons package.

You get a three blogs in one since I’m to lazy to write them separately:

Theme

First of all, just to say that I’ve started making a new theme that would fit with the Plasma’s default. It is inspired by the proposed new look for Kickoff (by Davide Bettio – http://www.uninstall.it/kickoff_mockup.png). It looks like this at the moment:

Lancelot Oxygen theme” width=”241″ height=”300″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-125″ />

To be honest, I don’t like it, but it fits more with the default Plasma theme. If there is anyone willing to modify it so that it looks more, well, appealing, just mail me, and you’ll get all the help you need This version will be in the SVN tomorrow (the 4.1 branch).

Categories versus one button

This comment by Beojan decided what will be the default:

I have to agree with this – by making the categories shown in the menu by default, the user gets the information of what categories exist. Later, it could be changed to my preferred behaviour.

Compilation issues and crashes.

I’m happy to announce that the compilation issues that were related to Xlibs are now gone. I was linking the Parts applet with the application, and then, it wanted to be linked to Xlibs that are not needed for the applet. Side effect is that now the applet .so file is much smaller.

In other news, the crashes that were occurring during the application browsing are history. At least, I haven’t seen one in a while (if you encounter one, please notify me)