Sometimes It's The Little Things

Big, new things are always a blast to work on, but sometimes polishing is also an enormously important part of software development which we often find ourselves just kind of pushing ahead of us on the todo list, because there's more fun things to be working on. However, those rough edges and lacklustre surfaces also need attention.

Just One Word

Occasionally you come across something where there's just that one word that looks out of place. You end up assuming that there must be some huge, complex underlying reason for why it's like that. And then, when you finally decide to go and look at it, you discover that it really is just a small wording error, either a copy/paste error, or just outright mis-wording something and then not catching it before rolling it out.

For example, when performing a system update in Discover, the Tasks view showed the string "View Updates - Installing". It turned out that, rather than being some scary thing due to a high level of abstraction and reuse of strings in various places, requiring decoupling and things like that, this was one of those situations where it was just worded incorrectly, and that's been fixed now.

Down In Front

A super specific one here. Sometimes in Kirigami applications, the handles for the drawers (global and context) will be covering bits of the UI. This happens when something is put at the bottom of a page, specifically on the very left or right most side of the page. The fix is extremely simple, so if you come across something like that, sorting it out just takes a single line.

Don't Get Cut Off

You're going through your day to day, maybe playing around with the layout of your desktop, or actually working on some important work type thing, or an even more important hobby task, and you come across a bit of the user interface that looks like it's been chopped off.

Sometimes these turn into something a bit more involved, but even then you can start out with something that maybe isn't exactly perfect, or even particularly good at all. Other members of our little community will be able to guide you in a direction that actually works more properly, and perhaps even helps fix an issue found in other, sometimes surprising places.

Sometimes they are outright simple, however. Indeed, this second one (unmerged as i'm writing these words) was what made me write this entry, because...

Now Over To You

My hope in writing this short update of semi-randomly selected things is that i might convince you that when you spot things like that, you are more than welcome hop over to KDE's Invent and take a look at the code yourself. Maybe it is one of the big, scary things, and that's where bugs.kde.org comes in - tell us it's wrong, because while it might be super obvious to you, maybe the rest of us just haven't noticed, and that makes your observation great in itself.

But if it's not, well... why not grab yourself a clone and put up a merge request or two? Remember, those merge requests exist to specifically make sure that if you've missed something, others will catch it during the review, so you don't have to be scared. Give it a shot, the worst that can happen is you'll learn something about a codebase you've not looked at before :)

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The word of the day is: Shiny, because that's what things become when you polish them

The Application Of New Things

KDE has, for a very long time, had this thing called Get Hot New Stuff, which is the name for a whole pile of tech which all exists just so you can just click a button in your wallpapers dialog that will pop up a dialog where you can, well, get hot new wallpapers for your system. Or mouse cursors. Or Plasma themes. Or books in Peruse. Or templates in a bunch of apps, or any variety of other things.

For a while now, it's been possible to add something called an adoption command, which is what will make a button show up in that dialog, and in Discover, labelled "Use". It's been used in a few places, but i recently sat down and got a bunch of little tools done that lets you set various things from the command line, and that in turn allowed me to also add those tools as adoption commands for the Get Hot New Stuff dialogues which download the stuff that those tools can apply.

How To Use A Wallpaper

What that means is that, fresh off the back of the 5.21 release, we've got that merged in, and it should become available to anybody running master pretty much immediately, and anybody who doesn't, well, hopefully in not too long.

The specific things that have had an adoption command added are:

• Window Decorations - that is, themes for KWin's Aurora theming engine
• Wallpapers - technically there was already an adoption command set, but it didn't work very reliably
• Cursor Themes - cursor as in mouse cursor
• Color Schemes - the things which define what colours your entire desktop uses
• Plasma Themes - what defines how Plasma draws all it's UI components (panels, applets, all that lovely stuff)
• Global Themes - complete packages of full-desktop settings, which adapt the look and feel of your entire desktop to something new

What all this means is that when scrolling through the content of one of the dialogues which let you grab these things, if there's a way to just outright guess what the thing should be applied to, in a global sort of fashion, there should be an adoption command for it.

It also means that, apart from the KWin tool, which is not installed as a systemwide tool (look for kwin-applywindowdecoration in your libexec if you want a play), you can now interact with these things from the command line. This is more or less done the same way you've been able to do with Global Themes for a while now using lookandfeeltool, which with this patch also got a quick bit of attention to make sure it would work as an adoption command, as well as a quick rename to match the naming scheme for the new tools. The new tools are all named plasma-apply-(thingtheyapply), so if you just type that out and tap the tab button, you should see all of them show up for you to play with.

What Desktop Themes Does leinir Have?

Finally, if you spot a dialog that seems like it should have this, but doesn't, do give me a poke, either here or on bugs.kde.org, and we can try and sort it out. Also, if you look at the merge request itself, you'll notice how these tools really aren't particularly scary for the most part. If you would like somewhere nice and self contained to jump in and do some work? Well, there's a good spot for you :)

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The word of the day is: User. The thing you become upon clicking the Use button in a Get Hot New Stuff dialog ;)