key bindings

[maitre at ccs.neu.edu (brad)]

On Wednesday 20 November 2002 10:17 am, John Chambers wrote:
> | These things are best done with the GUI (that's its purpose). The file
> | was not designed with hand-editing in mind.
>
> This is, of course, a nonsequitur.  If A is better than B at  a  job,
> the  fact that B was designed to do the job isn't really relevant.  A
> is still better.
Yes it is. The KDE folk did leave the file in a flat ascii text format so that 
you can editit if you like. I believe it is an ini style file. Here's a good 
description of it from openbsd's man page of isakmpd.conf(5)

"The file is of a well known type of format called .INI style, named after
the suffix used by an overrated windowing environment for its configura-
tion files."

The overrated windowing env is Windows, not KDE.


> Also, it's very rare that the interactive config  tools  include  all
> the  config options.  This is because the developers don't use such a
> tool much, since  it  doesn't  work  well  in  their  semi-functional
> development situation.
It is actaully the case here. Since this options are simple (just a list of 
key-value pairs), creating a gui which can handle all options is possible. 

> If KDE really can't be configured by editing its config  files,  that
> is  a serious argument against it.  What do you do when you bollix up
> the configuration, and as a result, the GUI config tool is a zombie?
It can be. There's just necessary warning attached with doing it :). There are 
certain options which are supported and options that will work, but are not 
supported. (supported meaning if a bug is filed they will look at it) You may 
(or may not) be suprised how many people edit a config file and file bug 
becuase it was something that they hand edited. 

Anyhow, i understand your point.

> | I would highly recommend not editing this
> | file by hand. If you intend to deploy these key binding to a large number
> | of workstations, configure using the GUI and copy the necessary file,
> | which is ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals.
> |
> | That being said, the file is ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals, so go nuts.
>
> It would be interesting to know how reasonable  it  is  to  do  this.
> Also, on this workstation, I don't seem to have such a file, although
> the ~/.kde/share/config/ is populated.  Maybe it's  using  a  default
> file somewhere that I don't know about?

I would take a guess that the defaults are hard-coded, so that if the config 
file doesn't exist the env can still operate. Perhaps you can try to change a 
keybinding and see if the file gets created or not.

By, they way, there are two locations to look for kde config files 
~/.kde/share/config ant $KDEDIR/share/config.

-brad