YaKuake - Instant terminal for KDE

YaKuake is for you if you ever wished for summoning a customizable terminal with a single keypress. Being in KDE extragear, it is most likely contained in your repositories. To check it out, install the yakuake package and start it from the K Menu.

Once it is started, press F12 to show/hide the Yakuake terminal. Nice and practical, isn't it? What makes this application even better is that it supports splitting the view, as well as detaching of inline shells into separate tabs, which is similar in behavior to the console-based screen, tmux or dvtm window managers.

All functionality is (also) accessible via keyboard shortcuts. To split the view horizontally/vertically, press CTRL-SHIFT-T and CTRL-SHIFT-L, respectively. Create a new tab with CTRL-SHIFT-N. You can close shells using CTRL-SHIFT-R, or by logging out of that shell using CTRL-D or the exit command.

Navigation is straightforward. You can cycle through the shells within a split view using CTRL-SHIFT-Up/Down, and go through tabs with SHIFT-Left/Right. CTRL-SHIFT-Left/Right lets you move a tab to another position.

As with every shell related application, I consider it crucial to customize the settings to my likings and requirements for a streamlined workflow. You might want to increase YaKuake's height to make better use of your screen estate. I also set the application to not stay open when it loses focus, so I can click somewhere and have it out of the way. I also activate the "highlight terminals when they are activated" thing, which is very useful in splitscreen. You can access the settings by clicking the little down arrow on the right of YaKuake's "bottom bar".

Howto: Plasmoid that shows your online Kopete contacts

Together with Pidgin, Kopete is certainly one of the top choices for a multi-protocol messenger in a Linux environment. Although it doesn't support all of the (usually rather annoying) extra features of some protocols, it allows me to keep in touch with my family and fellows without having to install three different chat applications. What sort of bugs me is the currently missing IRC support, besides of that it does everything I need it to and integrates well with other KDE based software.

Now what if I want to start a chat quickly without opening the contact list, you might have asked yourself? Well, you are not out of luck. What you need to do is install an additional plasmoid that contains a few detachable widgets. It is called Lancelot and can be obtained by installing kdeplasma-addons.

Unlock the widgets if necessary by right clicking on the desktop, then right click again and choose "add widgets" (I'm using German KDE, so it might read differently in the English localization). Select the Lancelot launcher (not the component) and drag it to some free space on your desktop or the panel.

That's a nice menu, isn't it? The best thing about it is that you can drag the title of a section and tear off a copy, which can then be placed anywhere as an independent plasmoid. Tear off the contacts section and place it on the desktop or in the panel, and you have a nice widget that displays your online contacts and allows for starting a conversation with a click, or by just hovering the mouse over the right hand arrow (that no-click behavior can also be switched off if it sucks for you). You can remove the Lancelot launcher afterwards if you don't need it anymore.

Gmail works with Konqueror now! Sort of

Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine is known to not be really full-featured when it comes to full-blown web applications like Google Docs, Gmail, iGoogle and Zoho. Of course I have kpart-webkit installed so I can toggle engines on the fly, but it is just buggy in a different way, so it doesn't work with these apps either. Arora works fine but is in an early stage of development and crashes regularly, also it doesn't integrate as well in KDE as I would like.

While I have no means of getting a full web experience with a KDE based browser, I got Gmail running flawlessly on Konqueror. It seems Google has updated some of the code to make it more cross-browser compliant. However, you will still get the "unsupported browser" warning and a hell of quirks when visiting Gmail and going to your inbox. That is, until you forge the user agent to identify as Firefox 3.0.5 (other versions or browsers will not work, it has to be that one). Gmail works as intended then, including advanced functions like creating filters. In Konqueror's settings, you can specify to always use that user agent on mail.google.com.