Version: (using KDE Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources OS: Linux When editing a document in kwrite, a label [modified] is appended to the window decoration caption. This however is not always visible (long paths), half-hidden windows, ... It would be nice if the "save" icon was also greyed out to show that a document need or need not to be saved, and this across all kde applications.
duplicated 85071
(wanted to close 85073)
Katepart can allways save a file, if the file is unmodified this is similar to do a touch(1) on the file. Kate provides a icon in the file list and a icon in the statusbar that indicates the state of the file, I don't know what other applications using katepart does, I can only encourage them to show the state of the current file in the status bar.
The save icon in the statusbar is not clearly visible, since the 'save' action is still enabled - and then the icon should be greyed too. By the way, some applications do not have such a statusbar (kwrite). As I mentionned initially, it is not only the case for kwrite, but also for all kde programs (change the kde standard ?). Other non-kde applications do this already, openoffice.org for example.
You can't change what happens -- WE WILL NOT DO WHAT YOU WANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You must undersand that I am a kate developer, and have been so for years. I marked the bug as WONTFIX because we have had this discussion before. If you can't live with it, use a different editor, I don't care. Katepart does never disable the save action, so it's icon will never be grayed out. If it is really so hard to understand, let me try to explain this in a simple way: - The toolbar button represents the "save" action, and will be rendered as disabled ("grayed out") whenever the acion is disabled (which is never the case, as i explained above). - The title for the editor widget will indicate the modified state of the document by adding the string " [modified]" when the document is modified. - As you can understand, the "modified" state of the document and the state of the "Save" action are two different things. If you can't handle that, maybe you should use an oter application. - All applications should make additional visualizations, for example in the status bar, to help users quickly realize the state of the document, but we can't force that on anybody. I care *shit* about what OOo does. KDE's mainwindows has very good means of getting a statusbar. This page indicates it use, which is also what I suggest here: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/statusbar/index.html Katepart has a signal that is emitted when the status of document changes, all client applications are hereby encouraged to use it to put information in the statusbar.
Ok, it has been discussed for kate before, so i won't insist (even for kde4 ? ... :) "[..] but we can't force that on anybody." - this wish was mostly related to the kde standard - i should perhaps find a dedicated mailing-list to discuss this (or has it been discussed earlier too ?)
The reason for not syncing the state of the "Save" action with the doucment state is very good, so I'd say no, not for KDE 4 neither. The KDE GUI guidelines allready encourages the use of the statusbar. It really can't be forced, developers *need* to implement it. It is resonable to expect that a document editor component provides the information, which katepart does. One moer comment from me -- we should add a section to kwrites statusbar showing the document state, so ack for that part. I put it on the TODO.
In fact, i am myself working on a kde program (not a very big one, just a pet project), and I was tempted to disable the save action - i have not found anything in the kde gui recommendations on this particular topic. I will use a statusbar now.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 95849 ***