Version: (using KDE KDE 3.2.3) Installed from: Debian testing/unstable Packages Compiler: gcc OS: Linux konqueror has the killer feature preloading. It makes it possible to start konqueror on a slow computer without *any* noticeable delay. I also use konsole, kcalc and kdialog very often. It would be great if they also had an option --preload, so that they can start out of memory! The best way would even be, to have a generic method, that every kde app automatically gets this ability and in kcontrol you can decide how many apps to start. I think konsole is the most active app of those where the preloading would be needed, so I submitted the wish there, but kdialog preloading would be the absolute hit! In scripting its very disturbing, that kdialog needs sooo long to start! (Needs over a sec on 2.2gig with 1 gig ram)
START ONLY ONE INSTANCE Here's a tip. Try using KHotKeys to send Alt+Ctrl+N (or whatever the hotkey may be!) to open a new terminal. If you want a new Konsole window, create a shortcut to "release from session". I use Ctrl+Shift+E, so it would look like: Ctrl+Shift+N:Ctrl+Shift+E. (U might also be able to use DCOP but I haven't tried that.) It will quickly open a new 'Konsole'. Create two entries. One which opens a 'new' Konsole if there's no instance open, and another entry to check if Konsole is running, --> and then sending the shortcuts! This also works great with KWrite. I agree with you... But I have a slower computer than you yet kdialog opens about half the time you mentioned. If you use a lot of speed techniques you can improve KDE launch time. This is a problem all down to X. So it's not KDE to blame. I feel it would be better if it opened a new session (window) every time you launched 'konsole', rather than a start of yet another process. It's such a waste of resources, and it should not be that problematic I believe to implement. It would be a good way to improve memory efficiency, speed etc. without much hassle. KDE Speed, performance tips http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Performance%20Tips Reducing FONTS and stripping the X-fonts improves startup speed a great deal. Try installing latest development package of fontconfig etc. You might also try to use prelink and preload, which will improve startup time. Turning of UTF8 in LANG also improves launch time. There are more... Gedit always opens a new window if you run "gedit --new-window", without wasting resources.
Konsole will be a single-instance application in KDE 4. I will mark this as fixed when the relevant code is merged into the mainline.
Implemented in KDE 4. Start Konsole with the --background-mode flag and it will create a new instance which runs in the background, which can be brought to the foreground by pressing F12. Flag names, shortcuts etc. are subject to change.