Poll: What KDE Feature Do You Most Want?

It would be a great improvement in writing texts with non-Latin1-letters to have a configurable keyboard. For example for classical greek texts (or biblical) you need greek letters with several different accents which don't appear in modern greek, you can find all of them in the unicode-block "greek extended", but how can you type them? (Of course you can choose the way "insert special character", but that's really not a good way if you have to do this at an average rate of one or two for each word!!)

A good feature wood be a "visual keyboard", as it is called I think in MS-Word2000, where you can see the foreign keyboard on the screen, so you always know where the letters are on your non-virtual keyboard. I think it is even possible to type the letters by clicking on them on the visual keyboard.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, especially in linguistics, where texts in living or dead languages such as hebrew, classical greek, sanskrit, georgian, aramaic etc. are examined. Just be inspired by the names of the unicode-blocks!
The invention of unicode is already a great improvement for this, but a smart keyboard utility would be perfect!

It would be a great improvement in writing texts with non-Latin1-letters to have a configurable keyboard. For example for classical greek texts (or biblical) you need greek letters with several different accents which don't appear in modern greek, you can find all of them in the unicode-block "greek extended", but how can you type them? (Of course you can choose the way "insert special character", but that's really not a good way if you have to do this at an average rate of one or two for each word!!)

A good feature wood be a "visual keyboard", as it is called I think in MS-Word2000, where you can see the foreign keyboard on the screen, so you always know where the letters are on your non-virtual keyboard. I think it is even possible to type the letters by clicking on them on the visual keyboard.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, especially in linguistics, where texts in living or dead languages such as hebrew, classical greek, sanskrit, georgian, aramaic etc. are examined. Just be inspired by the names of the unicode-blocks!
The invention of unicode is already a great improvement for this, but a smart keyboard utility would be perfect!

Yes, Speed, Konqueror improvement, Configuration utilities, and KOffice are a must for KDE to be the best Desktop Environment.

Here, I would request regarding Configuration utilities. We can have the sources from:

1. LinuxConf (use the concept not the dialogs)
2. DrakConf (for X and other system configurations)
3. Other configurations tools/utilities (like from corel linux, redhat's and suse's)

I want the sources and the concept to be used in KDE's configuration utitlities, and not the same old bad interface of some good but weird looking utilities like LinuxConf. Thanks.

Yours truly,
Rizwaan.

I would like to see more system-tools integratet in the ControlCenter. E.g. UserManager or the VInit Control tool.
Also some emprovments of existing tools should be done. I am missing a feature to configer my wheelmouse (it still does not work unter KDE 2.1.1 / XFree4.02) and a good font manager which is as easy to use as the font folder unter windows (copy/paste/drag'n drop/delete fonts). Preview function of non installed font's would also be nice.
I'm missing a tool for configuring the keyboard, too. I always become confused when the numerical block does different things unter Windows and Linux: Try the following. Switch Numlock off, put the cursor in the middle of a text line, hold the shift key and press "End" in the nummerical block. Try it under Windows and Linux.

ok, that's all for tonight.

Andreas

I read a _great_ posting on Slashdot that really helped my system. Unfortunately, it's only good for Linux users.

Here's a expert (sorry, no link:)

"I found if you change the /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h file to #define HZ 1000 rather than #define HZ 100 everything GUI was _much_ _much_ faster. The GIMP seems to load in literally 1/5 the time."

(Blah blah, recompile the kernel with this option etc.)

I'll second his notion! This trick worked great! Oh, the other tip is to renice X to -10 and should work on any Unix system, rather than just Linux.

Both of these tips are meant for workstations only. Apparantly changing the Hz on a server slows down the back-end processes.

Oh, and despite claims to the contrary, anything I've used kernel wise from 2.2.x up to and including 2.4.4 has set HZ to a default of 100.

Anyway, that's my tip. Of course any kernel mods must be taken with caution, so if you don't feel comfortable attempting it, don't.

Cheers,

Ben

I would _love_ to have TV functionality in Noatun. :-) kwintv is far too unstable, and it would be cool to have all things in the "visual & audio" department in Noatun.. :-)

Njaard! get coding! ;)

--
arcade

First of, amazing job guys. KDE just improves at lightspeed. There is no better file manager than Konqi anywhere, and you all have set the standard for smart, easy-to-use Cookie, Java and UserAgent management.

As for things I want:
1) My highest priority is an IMAP mailer. I have been using KMail in KDE-2.2-1 alpha, but it has a few serious problems. The key one is that it does not seem to cache IMAP mail locally.
I would like to see KMail do good IMAP caching, and syncing, with the kind of fine-grained control the KDE so excels at. One thing that would advance KMail way beyond other IMAP mailers would be if it could keep track of the tasks it is performing and allow the user to prioritize or cancel any one of them, without stopping others. Also nice would be persistent folder views (like the strange Polarbar mailer).

2) Compatibility with Windows. Sorry folks, I just can't get rid of Windows any time soon - it'd be really nice to be able to read and write Word docs, read the Windows address book, and IE bookmarks and generally have access to Windows data while in KDE. This would also smooth the transition for everyone.

Again, thanks for all the great work on KDE.

Cheers,

Eric

durnit, i wanna be able to copy and paste text with konsole. maybe konsole will do it and i'm gonna be really happy when i upgrade, i dunno.. (gnome terminal has had this for a while now, and i'm jealous.)

I would really like to see an option to enable or disable Viewing hidden Folders in Tree View of Konqueror,and eventually more configurable View of Treeview :-)

Thank you for listening

AB

What about:
reduce code size?
Or increase component reusability?

I think those would really help KDE on the long run.

Keep up the excellent work!

Andrea

To click the button 'update kde', and have the latest version with the most wanted features running on my system! ;)

So far, everybody wants a winblowz clone. I don't need a winblowz clone!! I need speed, efficiency, stability, and security, not necessary in that order. Less spoon-feed-me-features with CPU and memory hogging side effects, and not to mention stability and security.

There exist many feature-ridden OS' available, and you know where they come from. I need an alternative to this feature-driven philosophy.

Currently, I am trying out KDE2 on OpenBSD. The efficiency and speed is slower than 98 or even nt4. Haven't got it set up properly, yet, but I am not impressed. I'll admit that it's nice and is an improvement to KDE1, but just slow for my taste.

the ability to save x,y window locations when an
application opens.

thanks to all the kde hackers for their fine
efforts in making linux a better experience!

What I _really_ would like is for konsole to support ANSI fonts such as vga.pcf, etc. Konsole is such a great terminal, but it doesn't support the _real_ linux console fonts.

The most thing i want is better multimedia capability.
KDE has got a quite good media player (noatun). But have you tried to play AVI-Files containig special encodings ? I have a lot of those files on cd but most of them do not work. Also a professional sound recording and editing software is missing.
I also would say that an image viewer like kuickshow should be part and standard viewer of the KDE distribution because it's simple to use, allows fullscreen view without the windowbar, has an auto-scale option for the best view and last but not least it's very fast !

I would love to see the option of having a NeXTSTEP style menubar, with tear off sub menus. I find it much more elegant than having the menubar at the top of the screen or in the app's window. If KDE can do a Mac style menubar then a NeXTSTEP style menubar shouldn't be too much of a problem. Maybe it could even let you pop up the whole menubar under the mouse pointer when pressing a keyboard shortcut, or have it mapped to an extra mouse button.

There is a screenshot showing the NeXTSTEP menubar here:

http://www120.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/intro.htmld/newsflash.gif

I would also like to see the option of a NeXTSTEP like file browser, preferably with the extra features that are in WinBrowser. I find that I can browse and manage files very quickly with a single window open using this kind of file browser.

Here is a screenshot of WinBrowser:

http://www.winbrowser.com/mainscreenimage.htm

kde is changing rapidly.average users need a way to upgrade.please put all of the packages in one directory with an installer or at least a script.
i use mandrake7.2. tried an up grade to 2.1 from 2.0 and got lots of error messanges.having killer the computer many times i quit.a working out of date computer is better than an attempted up grade that fails.
how can i recomend linux when it is so hard to upgrade?

Lately I've been trying to watch some movies, and I had extremly hard time. I ended up booting to windows and watching the movies there, which wasn't very pleasant since it crashed about every 8 minutes.
It would be nice if KDE had a movie player that supports mpeg, some common avis, mov files, and the OpenDivX plugin (www.projectmayo.com).

Thanx!

With all the folks talking about IMAP, I thought I'd hit on a little something different here. How KMail handles addresses.

At this point in time, my personal opinion is that Netscape 4.7x handles this better than any other mail client out there. For a moment let's just ignore NS's other probs.

First off, the address book itself is fantastic. Allows for multiple books to organize addresses, and the storage of all kinds of other goodies. Built for syncing in with Palm Pilots, which will do nothing but increase in importance. Also, full and seemless integration with an LDAP server allowing for a centralized address book to call from. This is a priceless feature for anyone providing addresses to a company or large organization (like KDE folks for instance).

Couple this with an elegant auto completion feature in the composition window, and nothing else even comes close. The auto complete is even capable of mapping to an LDAP server defined in the address book. This is a huge feature for me where I work, and why I've kept my users using Netscape mail right up to this day.

A little something that Mozilla just got in there is an auto grab for addresses coming into your inbox. All these addresses go into a folder of their own to allow you to copy them to live folders later if you so choose. You can force an address into the book by simply clicking on it from within the mail body. In short, the address book should have MUCH tighter integration into KMail.

The other part of this is how each address you enter appears on a line of it's own in the composition window. Each one shows both the name and address next to eachother, and allows for setting any line to "To:", "cc:", and "bcc:".

For me, I can use IMAP or leave it. POP is usually a viable option for me. A truly intuitive addressing system on the other hand is something that hits home with me every time I write a new E-Mail.

I've been finding that Konqueror makes for a really outstanding FTP client. Along these lines, it'd be nice to see an FTP configuration section in the prefs. Also, some FTP specific bookmark values would be sweet. There's a number of things that an FTP client might need to be configured for that simply don't apply to a web bookmark. It'd be nice to be able to define a bookmark as an FTP site, and allow a user to add site specific data. Stuff like whether or not to use PASV, port numbers (yeah, I know that can go in the URL), setup for sftp, and goodies like that.

I'd also like to be able to use the side panel in Konqueror to navigate directories on the remote server similar to what a user sees on the local hard drive. Some 3rd party Windows Explorer extensions allow you to add FTP sites over in the left hand pane along with directories and such. Something along these lines would really trick up Konq's FTP abilities.

As it is, Konq does pretty good at FTP without all that. Even still, it'd be nice to see some of this come about.

I know this doesn't relate directly to KDE.. but it'd be nice to have a red-carpet channel. This would take care of the installer, at least for me and many others.

Heh. Reading such a huge amount of requests I ask myself: ho is gonna do it? People, please, give these hardworking guys a break. Take it easy.
Konqueror is in pretty good shape (hm, java is sometimes a problem, but as far as I know, the sites that sucks are sites 'best viewed in Micro$ft Internet Explorer'. Kword is much more stable now (I am talking about 1.1 beta), and import and export filters will be finished in a few months. If Micro$soft goes xml way, better for us, and easier for us.
So if we get a stable kdeoffice with kde 2.2 we should all be happy. And then, I am sure that kde developers are aware that next step should be multimedia, and when I say multimedia I mean video and streaming media. Unfortunately, only real.com has a guy who works on konqueror integration of realplayer, and we can't expect that other bigwigs do something in this direction: Apple & Microsoft. I've noticed lately that many sites which have supported realplayer now only support window's media player and apple's
quick time. I don't know. This is going to be difficult task.
But hey, remember, just a few months ago antialiased fonts on Linux desktop was a dream, and now it is a normal thing (at least in kde;-). Kde developers gave us so many improvements in such a short time that it is incredible.
I have only only one request: enjoy and have some fun, as much as I enjoy and have fun using kde.

I feel bad that KDE 2.x do not convert all important and useful options and modules from KDE 1.x, like

1. Find in Page
2. Window buttons module
3. Color in Konqueror (as in KFM) users can't have their own html background and foreground color in KDE 2.x. that's bad. and please this should be there, instead of CSS sheet files.

By the way 'Corel's Find Computer' application should be placed into Find submenu and 'Video Card' module of KControl can be easily ported to our KDE 2.2. Please have Configuration tools in KDE 2.2, now Redhat's DNS (bind), Apache etc., config tools should also be ported and Integrated to KDE for a complete Desktop Environment.

Don't mind but it seems that "KDE is at the Mercy of Gnome's tools!". KDE should be self dependent and should provide the ease of administration to everyone using Linux or any Unix flavor.

for KDE's sake please integrate Configuration tools in KDE.

Expecting and wishing for configuration tool integration in KDE 2.2...

KDE Lover!!!