Note: This isn’t directly related to KDE. However, since there isn’t such a tool for KDE at the moment, I figured some KDE users might find it interesting as well.

I recently bought a new mouse for my desktop computer, more specifically a Logitech Corded Mouse M500. Up until then I had been using an old mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. Now I suddenly have two extra mouse buttons, and a scroll wheel that you can tilt to the left and right. Let’s see how to take advantage of this.

The freewheel scroll feature is pretty nice as well

Bind keys with xbindkeys

As the name suggests, xbindkeys is a small program that lets you bind hotkeys to actions under X. Although it doesn’t include a GUI, it’s very easy to use. There is a graphical configuration tool called xbindkeys-config (GTK frontend), but in this guide I’ll edit the config file directly.

1. First of all you need to install xbindkeys, preferably through your package manager.
2. You can create a default configuration file with the command
   

   xbindkeys --defaults > $HOME/.xbindkeysrc

3. Open ~/.xbindkeysrc in your your favorite text editor. (If you can’t find it, make sure you have “Show hidden files” enabled).
   [This guide aims to be quite comprehensive - if you don't want to read everything, you can look at the default configuration file and try to figure out the rest yourself. It's not difficult if you read the included comments]
4. Let’s check the syntax. Everything after # are comments, which means that the program will ignore them.
   You can find the following text in the default file:

   # The format of a command line is:
   #    "command to start"
   #       associated key

   Below are also some examples – great. It’s probably a good idea to include a short comment (start the line with #) before each command, for example

   # short comment
       "command to start"
          associated key

5. "command to start" is simply a shell command (that you can run from a terminal). I’ll talk more about it under Actions.
6. associated key is the hotkey. Let’s take a closer look at how to find what we should write here. But before that, don’t forget the last step.
7. Start xbindkeys by running the command in a terminal.

Keyboard shortcuts

This section deals with keyboard shortcuts. If you’re only interested in mouse shortcuts, please see the next section Mouse shortcuts.

The first example in the generated .xbindkeysrc shows how you can define a hotkey:

 control+shift + q

A list of modifiers is included in the comments.

# List of modifier:
#   Release, Control, Shift, Mod1 (Alt), Mod2 (NumLock),
#   Mod3 (CapsLock), Mod4, Mod5 (Scroll).
#
# The release modifier is not a standard X modifier, but you can
# use it if you want to catch release events instead of press events
#
# By defaults, xbindkeys does not pay attention with the modifiers
# NumLock, CapsLock and ScrollLock.

Pretty straightforward, don’t you think? You can also use raw keycodes, as shown in the next example:

c:41 + m:0x4

Now this might look cryptic, but it’s really no problem – you can easily find the keycodes with the --key option. Run

xbindkeys -k

in a terminal and a window pops up. Press the desired hotkey and you should get an output similar to this:

Press combination of keys or/and click under the window.
You can use one of the two lines after "NoCommand"
in $HOME/.xbindkeysrc to bind a key.
"(Scheme function)"
 m:0x15 + c:34
 Control+Shift+Mod2 + q

In this case I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Q. Mod2 corresponds to Numlock which is ignored by default, as explained in the earlier text about modifiers. Apparently the  keycodes for this hotkey are m:0x15 + c:34.

Mouse shortcuts

Now that we know how to deal with keyboard hotkeys, mouse shortcuts should be a piece of cake. The first mouse button (left) is called b:1, the second (right) b:2 and so forth. Take a look at the third example and you’ll see how a mouse shortcut can be defined:

control + b:2

That’s right, you can combine mouse and keyboard shortcuts – great for those who don’t have a fancy mouse with extra buttons. I used to bind Super+ mouse buttons to various actions with my old mouse (Super is the Windows key on most keyboards).

To find out what a mouse button is called, you can use xev. Similar to xbindkeys -k that you used earlier, it pops up a window. However, this one isn’t closed automatically, and it also grabs mouse movement and clicks. Try to click/scroll in the window (without too much mouse movement), and you should see something like

ButtonPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3a00001,
 root 0x189, subw 0x0, time 55432271, (4,0), root:(1102,842),
 state 0x10, button 9, same_screen YES

in the terminal output. According to the last line, I just pressed mouse button 9, which translates to b:9 in .xbindkeysrc.

Actions

command to start is a command that you can run from a terminal, for example an application (dolphin) or a shell script (out of scope for this article).

Let’s take a concrete example. I want to bind wheel tilt -> switch to previous/next desktop. To do this I have to communicate with KWin, the default KDE window manager. KDE applications use D-Bus to communicate with each other, and you can “talk” to them with D-Bus as well with. (This is for KDE4, in the KDE3 series DCOP is used instead).

I’m not very familiar with D-Bus myself, but with the help of the qdbusviewer tool and some Googling I found that I can use the following command to switch desktop:

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.nextDesktop

Find the D-Bus call with qdbusviewer

According to xev (explained in Mouse shortcuts) the tilt to the left and right corresponds to b:6 and  b:7. Therefore, a part of my .xbindkeysrc looks like this:

# Previous desktop
"qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.previousDesktop"
  b:6

# Next desktop
"qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.nextDesktop"
  b:7

Don’t forget the quotation marks ("") around the commands!

Emulate key presses

Now I want to map the two other mouse buttons to the KWin effects “Present Windows” and “Desktop Grid”. I couldn’t find any D-Bus calls for this, so let’s try to achieve it in another way. The effects are already mapped to some keyboard shortcuts – maybe we can find a command to “emulate” these key presses?

The tool for doing this is called xte, and is included in the xautomation package. Again, install it with your package manager.

The default shortcut for “Show Desktop Grid” is Ctrl+F8. The following command should then activate the effect:

xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F8' 'keyup Control_L'

Whether we choose Control_L or Control_R doesn’t really matter. After confirming that it works, I added the following lines to .xbindkeysrc:

# Present Windows
"xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F10' 'keyup Control_L'"
  b:8

# Desktop Grid
"xte 'keydown Control_L' 'key F8' 'Control Super_L'"
  b:9

If nothing happens for you, make sure you emulate the right key presses. Have you changed any shortcuts?

xte --help displays some helpful text that you might find useful.

Apply settings and make xbindkeys autostart

Now we’re almost done! Remember that you have to restart xbindkeys to apply the changes:

killall xbindkeys && xbindkeys

As a final touch, let’s make xbindkeys autostart with KDE. It’s very easy to do with the new Autostart module.

1. Open System Settings.
2. Go to Advanced tab -> Autostart.
3. Click on “Add Program…”.
4. Write xbindkeys and press OK. A new dialog pops up. Press OK again.
5. Done!

Make xbindkeys autostart

Closing words

In this tutorial we’ve learned how to use the xbindkeys program to bind keyboard and mouse shortcuts to different commands. We also took a quick look at how to communicate with an application using qdbus and emulate key presses with xte. Finally, we made xbindkeys autostart.

I think it would be great if the “Input Actions” module in System Settings also supported mouse shortcuts. A more simple module for assigning mouse buttons to actions would be nice as well.

Hope that you found this guide helpful, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below if there’s anything on your mind.

Some time ago, a person on identi.ca asked in the KDE group which weather plasmoid people preferred. He seemed to like my suggestion, so I figured, why not share it here too?

The end result will look like this:

(but hopefully with less rain…)

As you can see, it’s an hourly forecast. It reports the weather, temperature, wind speed and direction and – most important for me – precipitation.

Enough talk already; here are the steps:

1. Install the Scripted Image plasmoid. It has some quirks (for example, auto reload doesn’t work on one of my computers), but I haven’t found a better alternative.
   The plasmoid is easily installed from the Add Widgets dialog (cashew -> Add Widgets…). Click on “Install New Widgets” and choose “Download New Plasma Widgets”. Search for “image” and press on “Install” in the “Scripted Image” box.

   
   Note: When I close the dialog I get a message stating that the installation failed. However, seeing how the widget appears fine, it seems like it’s just false alarm.

2. Go to yr.no and search for your city. Click on “Hour by hour” and get the URL for the image (in Konqueror: right click -> Actions -> Copy Path -> copy whole path).
   Of course you’re free to use another weather forecast service if you want, as long as it shows the forecast in an image.
3. Add “Scripted Image” to your desktop (cashew -> Add Widgets… -> drag “Scripted Image” to your desktop) and click on “Configure…” in the widget.
4. In the dialog, paste the URL from step 2 under “Image URL”. Choose an appropriate number of minutes (for example 30) for reload “Interval” and set “Scaling” to “Scale applet to content”. Click on “OK”.

We’re done! Hope you find it useful, and as always, comments are much appreciated.

The new desktop in KDE4 works quite differently from what many are used to. One thing many new users wonder is, “How does the desktop icons work?” In this post I’ll share my experience with icons in Plasma-desktop.

Note: I use the latest development version of KDE4, which means that some things may look slightly different on your computer.

Let’s start with the most simple icon. If you just want a “normal” desktop with icons, see the section “Traditional Desktop”.

Icon Widgets

You’ve probably already discovered the “Add Widgets” dialog, which lets you put all kind of stuff on your desktop: calculators, calenders, sticky notes and clocks, just to name a few. So how do we add an icon widget to the desktop?

There are many ways – a relative straightforward method is to drag and drop. For example, you can drag a file from the file manager Dolphin and drop it on the desktop. If you want a shortcut to an application, simply drag its icon from the application launcher.

Dragging an icon from Kickoff, the default application launcher

The result is an icon that behaves like the other widgets. You’ll notice that the black handle will appear on hover, and you can resize/rotate the icon.

The icon widget behaves like any other widget

Now you might wonder, “Why would anyone want to do that?”. I don’t know. But the fact is that this icon is a widget; for example, if you remove it from the desktop, the original file won’t be deleted. This has several disadvantages, such as not being able to sort icons and align them to grid. So how do we get more “traditional” icons?

Folder View

Folder View is basically a widget that shows the content of a directory. By default, there’s a Folder View on your desktop that displays the files in your desktop directory.

Folder view

You’ll find that Folder View, in contrast to the icon widgets, has the most features one would expect: you select icons, sort and align them to grid, create/delete files etc.

If you have a hard time understanding what the Folder View does, you can think of it as a Dolphin window (the default file manager) without any toolbars.

Folder View – Dolphin’s cousin living on the desktop?

The big difference is that you can’t navigate through directories (folders) in Folder View. Instead, it’ll launch your preferred file manager when you click on a folder.

You can add as many Folder Views as you want from the “Add Widgets” dialog and point them to different locations. In the next section, I’m going to talk briefly about how you can use Folder View.

Usage

First, let’s check the settings: right click -> Folder View Settings or press the wrench on the black border that appears on hover.

Folder View Setting – Location

First of all, you can set the location; i.e., the directory that the Folder View should show. Note that it isn’t restricted to local directories – you can also show files from remote FTP, SSH etc.

In “Display”, you can customize the look of the widget. Not much to say here.

The “Filter” page lets you set which types of items the Folder View should display. The default setting is “Show all files”, but you can choose to show or hide certain files based on their file name and type. For example. I might want to show all image files that begin with “kde” in a directory.

The last page, “Keyboard Shortcut”, doesn’t seem to be very useful at the moment. I think the idea is to set a shortcut to give the widget focus, but keyboard navigation in Folder View doesn’t appear to work very well at the moment.

Now, let’s give two concrete examples of how you can use Folder View.

Example 1. Favorite Applications

You might want to create a Folder View that shows your favorite applications. No problem.

1. Create a new directory somewhere in your home directory (e.g. ~/applications)
2. Add a new Folder View to your desktop and open its settings dialog.
3. In “Location”, click on “Specify a folder:” and enter the location (e.g. ~/applications). You can also click on the button to the right to select directory.
4. Go to “Display”. Change the label to “Applications” and check “Align to grid”.
5. Press OK.

Now you can add applications, for example by drag and drop from the application launcher. When you drop the icon, you’ll probably see a list with different options. “Copy here” should do just fine, since you only copy the .desktop file of the application. “Link here” also works. If you don’t want to see the list, hold down ctrl when you drag the icons.

Example 2. Downloaded PDF files

This main point of this example is to demonstrate the Filter option. Let’s say you want to show all PDF files in your “Download” directory:

1. Add a Folder View widget.
2. Point it to your download directory.
3. You might want to change some display settings, such as setting the label to “Downloaded PDF files”.
4. In “Filter”, choose “Show Files Matching”. Under “File Types:”, type “pdf” in the search bar.
5. Check “PDF Document (*.pdf)” that appears in the list below. Click on OK.

Only show PDF files

Traditional Desktop

So Folder View is great and everything, but what if I don’t want my icons in a box? There are many users that just want a traditional desktop. So they just have to resize a Folder View to cover their entire desktop and use a theme like Naked.

But that would be rather silly, wouldn’t it?

Actually, you can choose to use Folder View as your desktop, and it’s very easy to do:

1. Right click on the desktop -> Appearance Settings (in my version it’s called Desktop Settings, but I think KDE 4.2 uses the former name).
2. Under “Desktop Activity”, you can see “Type: Desktop”. Change “Desktop” to “Folder View” and click on OK.

Choosing Folder View as desktop type

You should now have a traditional desktop. Huzzah! To revert to the default desktop, right click -> Folder View Settings and change “Type” to “Desktop”. You’ll also find the Folder View settings in this dialog.

Tips

I hope that you found this somewhat helpful. To round things off, here are some tips:

• You can still add widgets to the traditional desktop. Click on the cashew and choose “Add widgets…”.
• Like any other widget, you can add Folder View to a panel.
• If you like the tip above, check out QuickAccess, “a small applet designed for the panel to have quick access to the most used folders”. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with KDE 4.2 yet.

Have fun!

One of the major complaints of Plasma is that you can’t remove the annoying icon from your panels or desktop. Oh yes, I’m talking about the infamous Cashew of Plasma.

Before

This is a small guide on how to get rid of the cashews. You probably need version 4.1 of KDE or higher and know a little bit about how to use the terminal.

Panel Cashew

The cashew here let’s you configure the panel by clicking on. If you feel that you’re satisfied with your setup and don’t need the cashew anymore, you can hide it be choosing “Lock Widgets”. This option can be found in many places, such as the right click menu, when you configure the panel or by clicking on the cashew in the upper right corner.

See, I’m not completely useless

Once you’ve locked your widgets, they can’t be moved, resized/rotated or removed anymore. The option to add new widgets will also be gone. If you want to change anything, simply unlock the widgets in the same way as you locked them.

Desktop Cashew

This one is a little bit tougher. You’ll notice that it won’t go away when you lock the widgets, which has caused frustration among many KDE4 users. One particular person decided to do something about it, and thus the I HATE the Cashew plasmoid was born.

Note: The preferable way to install this widget is through your package manager if it’s in the repositories. The steps below describe how to compile it from source.

1. Download the plasmoid here and save it somewhere in your home directory.
2. Extract the tbz file with the following command:

tar -xjvf filename


where filename is the name of the downloaded file, for example 91009-iHateTheCashew.tbz.



3. Run the following commands:

cd iHateTheCashew


mkdir build

cd build

4. Now we’re ready to compile the plasmoid:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix` ..


make

If you run into errors in this step, it’s most likely a dependency problem. Check that you have all necessary packages installed.

5. In most cases, you need root access to install the widget:

sudo make install

When you’ve typed your password and hit Enter, the plasmoid will be installed – you should now be ready for step 6. Below are some corner cases.

If the sudo command isn’t available, you can use the regular su command:

su
<type root password>
make install

Sometimes your user has write access to the directory where KDE4 is installed, for example if you have a KDE development environment set up according to this Techbase Tutorial. In that case, you can run make install without using sudo or su.

If you use the .bashrc in the link above, you can compile and install the plasmoid with a single command:

cmakekde ..

6. You should find your new plasmoid in the Add Widgets dialog. Add I HATE the cashew to your desktop (remember that you have to unlock the widgets first).

And we’re done! Lock your widgets again and all cashews should have disappeared.

After

If you want back on your desktop, simply remove the I HATE the cashew plasmoid by clicking on in the Add Widgets dialog. Nice, isn’t it?