Three months since 0.24 has been released, it’ been decided that what we have now in SVN/trunk will be called 0.25. Many updates have been introduced to the code, and I personally am very pleased. This is the mandatory screen shot:

Here is a list of some the things that I have done in the last version (the changelog is much bigger, this is just the stuff I did… which are, obviously, my favorite changes between 0.24 and 0.25):

CMake support is finished. Under Windows you get this funky application with a win32 icon and no console running, a proper native application. Linux works as usual, as this is the way I build my versions. God knows what happens on Mac.

Added white space display to the editors. When you open a file, you will see small dots on spaces, and this funky icon in tabs. I must admit I “borrowed” the idea from kate4. (1)

Merged two nested QTabWidgets. In 0.24 we had 2 QTabWidgets nested in each other for the project and debug outputs, I moved the tab pages to the outer QTabWidet, and changed the decoration to trigangular. That saved us a few pixels. (yay!)

Minor GUI optimizations. Merged two toolbars, once more to save space. All menus have shortcuts.

Possible to remove the editors toobars. Each text editor has this banner, which lists the classes and methods list in this file. I always hated that, so now you have a small checkbox which removes this so you can have more real-estate – more editing area.

English corrections. The original code was written in french, and then translated to English (using Qt4 i18n classes). At some point JL translated it back to English, and and since then we are fixing the UI.

Panic “this GUI scares me, give’me a text editor” button. IDEs are fun, since they have all this funky functionality. Which always leads to the “omg, what the are all those dock windows” syndrome. To remedy this, a new feature (happily stolen from HaiQ) will hide all your dock windows and show you a plain text editor. Press “control+e” to enable it, and once more to disable it, and show all your previous dock-windows.(2)

The source can be downloaded as usual from http://qdevelop.org/.

(1) A tip for the kate developers: when introduced this feature to the SVN, some user complained that the marks are not visible on some LCDs, and someone commited a fix, and made the colors more dark. In my original commit, I used colors darker then the ones used in kate, so you might need to make them much draker.
(2) My favorite button combination in QDevelop. I wish kdevelop had such magic button as well.

The techbase wiki, explains how to compile KDE4, and also instructs you to use SSH to obtain a usable terminal which is X11 aware. But still, you have to type a password, and remember to pass -X, to get X11 forwarded. Lets remove these obstacles.

Removing the password
From your normal user type:
ssh-keygen -t dsa [press enter twise or trice]
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub kde@localhost:

Now ssh normally to the kde4 user, and type (as the kde4 user):
mkdir -p .ssh
cat id_dsa.pub > .ssh/authorized_keys

Easy acess
Still each time you want to login as KDE4, you have to write this ugly command “ssh kde4@localhost -X“. Lets simplify it: I want to write “ssh kde4“. The trick is simple, put this in your normal account’s ~/.ssh/config (not the kde4 user!):
Host kde4
HostName localhost
User kde4
ForwardX11 yes

From now on, to get a KDE4 shell type “ssh kde4“, now password is required. Wow… life is simpler now…

(I am so going to get stoned by the developers…)

I installed KDE4rc1 on KUbuntu 7.10 64bit, as explained in the corresponding page (I installed from packages). This is my first time running a full KDE4 session, and while I am very exited by some applications (dolphin, konsole, kate marble, and more or less all kde4games), I must admit that as a full session, it’s not worth it.

First, the new theme is just bad. Too bright, and not enough contrast, which makes my eyes hurt. When I switched to Plastik or CleanLooks the GUI looked much better. Actually, I think that I am not completely happy with the icon theme, IMHO using Tango will also be a good idea. The window decoration is very confusing, as it’s not always sure which window is focused (the title of the focused window must be darker, and have much more border, unless we use shadows for displaying the current window).

Also the sound effects used by default are disturbing. Zoom and unzoom should not make any sound. While talking about kwin… I must tell you all that I tested the window effects, and they kinda worked pretty good, when I used XRender instead OpenGL. Yes, OpenGL is not supported on Intel based cards.

I know what the comments and follow ups will say, I know that KDE4 is (still) not aimed for users, but for developers. I know how hard the KDE developers have been working for getting a stable API (not implementation! API!) and it shows in the API documentation, regression tests, and the endless discussions in KCD. But still, I would like to get a working (real working) KDE4.0.0.