Version: Kickoff traditional menu (using KDE Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources OS: Linux At the moment the traditional kickoff KDE3 style menu does only display the description of an application. This has a few drawbacks like; 1. it's not easy to figure out what application will start since the only indicator is the description and the icon but not the name it may known under. For some who look for a "Web Browser" it may easier, for some who look for "Firefox" it just sucks. 2. multiple items may have the same name. As example 2 times "Web Browser", one for Konqueror and one for Firefox. Other samples here are "Audio Player", "Spreadsheet" or "Word Processor". All that cases assume there is only one of them available. There is more feedback from our users related to that wish at http://dot.kde.org/1199623673/1199632046/1199646383/
Created attachment 22921 [details] patch that changes "description" to "name (description)" The patch above is so far only a sample/suggestion how a solution that tries to at least take both, generic name and description, into account could look like. KDE3 did btw provide here an option to switch between; 1. name 2. description 3. description (name) 4. name (description)
there are two related but somewhat separate issues, imo: a) disambiguating between programs with the same generic name. i wonder how difficult (and efficient) it would be to compare if the next or previous item has the same generic name and if so to always paint the subtext in that case. b) allowing different styles for the main text. really, the only options we need here is to turn off the details-on-mouse-hover (so that they are always painted) and define what is in the header text (generic name or specific name). with those two options one can emulate all the behaviours in kde3, no? i realize that the above not useful for the simple menu. it probably needs its own options that are more like the kde3 ones. p.s. if you can remember, please use the kdelibs/plasma coding style =)
commit r762886 introduces an option like we had at KDE3. So, it will be available for KDE 4.1 :)
In case anyone else wants this for 4.0.x, here's the backport to 4.0.0 I just applied to the Fedora Rawhide kdebase-workspace package: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/rpms/kdebase-workspace/devel/kdebase-workspace-4.0.0-kde%23155362.patch?rev=1.1&view=markup
And here's one for 4.0.1, courtesy of Jan Mette from kdemod.ath.cx: http://kdemod.ath.cx/svn/branches/kde4/kdebase-workspace/backport-trunk-better_simplemenu.patch http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/rpms/kdebase-workspace/devel/kdebase-workspace-4.0.1-kde%23155362.patch?rev=1.1
Can this be backported to 4.0.2? (I have noticed it was not included in the bunch of backports done over the last few days.)
Added Riccardo to the CClist who was/is afaik responsible for the backports ;) @Riccardo Could we backport this one too?
Since this hadn't been backported to 4.0 yet (any chance it can get into 4.0.3?), here's an updated patch which applies against 4.0.2: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/rpms/kdebase-workspace/devel/kdebase-workspace-4.0.2-kde%23155362.patch?rev=1.1
Most of this has been merged into 4.0.3, the configuration part has been reverted by Aaron because it introduced new strings right before the 4.0.3 tagging, so here's the patch to restore it: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/rpms/kdebase-workspace/devel/kdebase-workspace-4.0.3-kde%23155362.patch?rev=1.1