The Road to KDE 4: Konsole Gets an Overhaul

Again, after a delay brought on by a bout Real Life (tm), we return to bring you updates on the state of Konsole, KDE's UNIX terminal program. Konsole has been a staple of KDE since KDE 1.0, as has been showing signs of a little bit of clutter and wear. So, Robert Knight has stepped in to clean up the program's code, and more than anything else, fix a cluttered and difficult interface. Read on for the details.

The goal of Konsole itself is pretty simple: provide a window to run a command prompt and command-line applications from. In fact, it has evolved from the very simple 'kvt' terminal program in the pre-KDE 1.0 days. An older KDE 1.x version of Konsole is pictured below:

Image courtesy of a (very old) book about Linux at linuxbook.orbdesigns.com licensed under the (also very old) Open Content License v1.

The version of Konsole from that era was very simple, but it wouldn't stay that way, as more and more features were added. Konsole users wanted transparency (shiny!), support for more text encoding schemes, ways to control every feature possible: Konsole ballooned into a monster. By KDE 3.x, it can best described as a highly-functional mess.

As an example of just how bad Konsole had become for KDE 3.x, I present the following screenshots, the first showing a normal Konsole window from KDE 3.5.6:

Possibly the worst settings menu of any KDE application in KDE 3.5.6 follows:

And if that isn't enough, actually going to the settings dialog makes the situation even worse.

If this isn't the most user-friendly theme dialog you've ever seen, then demand a refund. (I joke! It's actually terrible for many reasons, but the seemingly random nature of it is probably the best reason to dislike it).

The worst offenders are the settings menus, as you can see. An overly complex settings menu leads itself to an ugly settings dialog.

When the KDE 4 development series commenced, Robert Knight took over maintainership of Konsole. He decided that he would focus on bug reports and feature requests filed via the KDE Bugtracker, bugs.kde.org. Ever aware of the fact that users can be pretty picky about what features an application like Konsole needs to have, he created a few online surveys to help with the determination of the most common as well as fringe use cases. This feedback has driven much of the work.

The end result is a Konsole for KDE 4 that is visually very similar, functionally improved and with a settings system you can actually stomach. The screenshot below shows that the main window has not changed too much. The tabs are shown at the top in this screenshot, however Robert tells me that they have been defaulted to the bottom of the window as this article went to press. Additionally, you'll notice that the text on the tabs contains more helpful information. This is configurable is a friendly manner - see three shots down.

The once-intimidating settings menu now becomes very simple. It may look like the configuration options are gone, but they are still all available in a sanely organized fashion.

As you see below, the settings menu leads to a Profile selector, under which all the settings are kept separated. They are much more organized now, rather than an odd collection of random check boxes.

And lastly, the appearance people will appreciate this dialog: its implementation is effective and its use becomes obvious. Additionally, Robert has implemented style previews in an intuitive manner. As you mouse over the style, the Konsole window in the background automatically applies that style in an active preview. So you can very rapidly look through and appreciate the styles just by hovering over the list.

Side-by-side comparisons aside, Konsole also offers a number of other improvements. Among them, split-view mode, faster scrolling (thanks to a smarter line redrawing scheme), hotkeys and more.

Much of the inspiration for these improvements comes from analysing other programs. For example, the split-view mode, pictured below, is inspired by GNU Screen. It is a console output cloning tool so that you can see two views of the same scroll buffer. For example, if you are a developer, and you need to compile something really big (like say, KDE), then you can read through the scroll at your own pace on one side, while still monitor the output progress simultaneously. This is not a multi-panel model like Konqueror, so much as it is a cloning mode that lets you see more than one thing at a time within the same buffer. In this shot, the two sides are displaying the same output, just scrolled to different points.

There is friendly interaction between Konsole and some of its biggest users. In particular, Yakuake just recently implemented a Split View mode like the one listed above. When I asked Eike Hein about the relationship between the two projects, he said "I think Yakuake is beneficial to Konsole in KDE 4 in so much as Yakuake is a more demanding user of the Konsole KPart than most applications, so developing Yakuake has resulted in finding out a few things about how the KPart's interface can be improved :)"

Konsole has benefited from a few features that were requested by the Yakuake users. For example, there is a new hotkey that pops the terminal up and down quickly. This was in response to requests from the Yakuake users when Robert did his interface survey. Of course, like all things KDE, it is configurable. With Robert at the helm, it is even more user-friendly to configure it.

Future plans for Konsole include, among other things, ideas such as: tear off tabs, a commandline configuration interface, and making tea. I asked Robert if it would one day make coffee, but he's British and much prefers it to make tea it seems. Perhaps when it obtains beverage-making abilities, this argument will resurface once again. :)

On a side note, this is the first time I have attempted to write my article from within KDE 4 itself. While a few applications were not stable enough to use, including Kicker (which is dying anyway), the experience was good enough that I will probably do the same henceforth. Now that the libraries have mostly settled down (with a few exceptions), the changes are becoming more apparent in the applications. I'll be keeping an eye out for more things to feature in this series, but the next topic should be the KWin window manager, barring any major problems. Cheers.