Bug 170949

Version:            (using KDE 4.1.1)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages

Greetings KDE people. A long-standing peeve of mine is the text in about boxes. Usually when I (and I assume at least some other people) are exploring the new random apps linux tends to install, if I don't know what an app *does* I check Help->About.

This is usually disappointing. Usually they say something like. "KFobulator, written by John Smith 2002". To give a concrete example KCron just says "KDE Task Scheduler". That's it! A new user who had never heard of cron may find this somewhat confusing. I'd certainly appreciate a bit more verbosity and it would come with no disadvantage (apart from maybe a *slight* increase in workload for translators). Another example, KHexEdit: "KDE Hex Editor"! Really? What is one of these hex editors I hear you cry.

Anyway, I propose that someone (me?) goes through all the KDE apps and write a nice new user friendly bit about what each app actually *does*. I've made a start, perhaps this could be a techbase project...:


KDE

Current text:

The K Desktop Environment is written and maintained by the KDE Team, a world-wide network of software engineers committed to Free Software development.

No single group, company or organisation controls the KDE source code. Everyone is welcome to contribute to KDE.

Visit http://www.kde.org for more information on the KDE project. 

Proposed text:

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is a large collection of applications and frameworks. It can run on a variety of operating systems including Linux and Microsoft Windows. Everything from the 'panel' (task bar) to KPatience (a solitaire card game) is a part of KDE. Applications that are not part of KDE can easily be run in the KDE environment however they may have a different look and feel to the consistant style of KDE. 

KDE is written and maintained by a world-wide network of software engineers committed to Free Software development. No single group, company or organisation controls the KDE source code. Everyone is welcome to contribute to KDE.

Visit http://www.kde.org/ for more information on the KDE project. The second best desktop environment - GNOME can be found at http://www.gnome.org/ !

Kate

Kate is an advanced text editor for KDE. It is intended for editing raw text, rather than word processing so it does not support formatting text. Instead it has a number of features that aid programming and advanced text manipulation such as syntax highlighting, automatic indentation and regex search and replace.

KDevelop

KDevelop is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for KDE. It collects all the tools needed for development of a computer program in one place. The main features are a text editor for writing the program, shortcuts to compile the program and an integrated debugger. It also features integrated version control, a GUI designer and API documentation.

KWrite

KWrite is a lightweight text editor, similar to Kate - the other KDE text editor. It is designed for quick editing of notes, configuration files and the like. It is not recommended for programming or word processing.

Konsole

Konsole is an X terminal emulator for KDE. It allows you to access the command line (or 'console') and run commands. It is similar to the DOS prompt on Windows (tm) but more usable and powerful. Konsole supports colour schemes and multiple tabs.

KMag

KMag is a screen magnifier. It provides a magnified view of the area of the screen around the mouse cursor. This is useful for people with poor vision or occasionally when you want to use your computer from across the room.

KCalc

KCalc is the KDE calculator. It can be used to perform basic arithmatic and also calculations with a number of simple mathematical functions.

Okular

Okular is a document viewer for KDE. It's primary purpose is for viewing and printing PDFs, though many other formats are supported such as DejaVu, DVI, CHM, etc.

KCharSelect

KCharSelect shows the 'character map' for a given font. This is a list of characters (glyphs) that are contained in the font. It allows you to select and copy special symbols that cannot be typed on a keyboard. Note that if a font does not contain a symbol, the system will try to use other fonts to provide it so the symbols shown may not be from the selected font. Also note that if you are sending esoteric charactes over the internet, the recepient must have the relavent font installed in order to view the characters.

KRename

Amazingly has a decent about box!

KFileReplace

KFileReplace allows you to do a 'search and replace' in many files at once. It supports advanced features such as regular expressions, creation of backup files and using the output from external commands.

KLinkStatus

KLinkStatus is a web link checker for KDE. It can crawl a website and check that all the hyperlinks point to an existing document.