what’s on the menu?

yet another main menu post here!kickoff_new1.PNG

today, i have officially retired my pixmap-based Kickoff menu for the re-implemented tabbing with QTabWidget or Kickoff-qstyle. this re-implemented tabbing has been around since November of last year (2006). i didn’t like it much. the widgets then were a bit odd. it made Kickoff look horrible. just as soon as they did a wonderful job on providing a user-friendly main menu option for Linux users, they had to go and mess it up. again! but it’s still in development of course. bit by bit, though, it is being polished up by the Kickoff developers. now it has come to a state where i am encouraged to use the Kickoff-qstyle main menu. and it has a pretty little shadow too.. .

but the main reason why it took me this long to shift to the Kickoff-qstyle was more of functionality. basically only a little has changed on both the pixmap-based menu and the qstyle one. so i found no real reason to shift. everything that i need and like, appearance-wise and functionality-wise is already implemented. if it ain’t broken, why fix it, eh? err.. .well not really everything. i still hate the switch-tabs-on-hover or off goes Kickoff like a freaking jack-in-the-box everytime your mouse glides over the main menu button. that behavior is quite annoying. until they introduced the “hidden” features that is only implemented on the Kickoff-qstyle version. this has been around since January, but i have not been visiting websvn.kde.org as often as before. (oops.. . they’ve added an option in the GUI to “Open menu on hover” for some time already)

so to cut it short, the following are the improvements that are not available on the GUI:

1.) options below should be added to kickerrc

[General]
ScrollFlipView=true
KickoffFontPointSizeOffset=-2
KickoffSwitchTabsOnHover=false
KickoffTabBarFormat=IconOnly

ScrollFlipView accepts the value of true or false. this toggles the scrolling effect in the application browser.

KickoffFontPointSizeOffset takes in positive and negative values and is added to the calculated font sizes relative to your system font settings

KickoffSwitchTabsOnHover is the best part. at last! give this a false value and you have to click on the tabs to switch to it. sweet!

KickoffTabBarFormat takes LabelAndIcon, LabelOnly and IconOnly, which then sets the appearance of the tabs with labels and icons or either

2.) this one is for ksmserverrc

[General]
confirmLogoutDelay=1
confirmRebootDelay=3
confirmShutdownDelay=3

These configures the confirmation dialogs for the “Leave” actions on Kickoff.

confirmLogoutDelay with a value of 0 makes the corresponding confirmation box not to appear

confirmRebootDelay and confirmShutdownDelay both takes values in seconds

After you have made the changes, restart Kicker.

there is rather a peculiar behavior that i’ve noticed recently. when you are searching for something on Kickoff and then decide to hit the favorites tab. nothing happens. it doesn’t switch to favorites. you have to click the other tabs first.

also the rightmost tab, or the Leave tab, seems to be hanging. notice that the horizontal line supposedly going from left to right doesn’t continue to the right. it stops abruptly after the right rounded corner of the tab ends and joins the line. this is clearly emphasized when the said tab is selected.

source: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2620

related post: http://yamzz.blogspot.com/2007/03/suse-kickoff-hidden-options.html  http://yamz.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/kickoff-season/

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Notice: This article was published on March 1, 2007 and the content above may be out of date.
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