Robert Stoffers &kde; offers a varying number of ways to launch programs. You may: Simply select the relevant item in the &kmenu;. Run the program from &konsole;, or by clicking the &kmenu; and choosing Run Command... (while you still might prefer the quick keyboard shortcut, which is simply &Alt;F2). Create a shortcut on the desktop or use &kicker;'s quick launcher. The &kmenu; functions much like the Start menu of &Windows;, however it breaks programs up by what they do. Programs on the &kmenu; are broken into category menus, such as Multimedia and Office. Under these category menus there are subcategory menus, such as Sound, Video and Graphics. Under the subcategory menus lie program launchers, which, when clicked on, launch the associated application. Depending on the program, there may not be a launcher in the &kmenu;. To search your hard drive for more applications, click the &kmenu;, choose Run Command and type kappfinder. In &kappfinder;, click Scan, and the hard drive will be searched for programs. Click the checkbox next to each program to be added to the &kmenu;, and click Apply and Close. The &kmenu; now will have new program launchers under the relevant category menus. Launchers to programs may also be placed on the desktop. To create a new launcher, right click on the desktop, and choose Create NewLink to Application. On the &kdesktop; properties dialog box, type in the name of the program on the General tab. You may also wish to choose a custom icon by clicking on the gear icon. Click the Application tab and type a short sentence about the program in the Description textbox. In the Command textbox, type the name of the program (case sensitive), and any command line options you wish to use. Choose OK, and your new program launcher will be created on your desktop. Simply click on the new launcher on the desktop and the associated program will run. To launch a program using &konsole;, click the &kmenu; and choose SystemTerminals Konsole. Once &konsole; appears on the screen, simply type the name of the program you wish to launch (remembering that bash, the command language interpreter that &konsole; uses by default, is case-sensitive) and press Enter. If you are unsure about the name of a program, type the first few letters then press the key on your keyboard. By pressing , bash (through &konsole;) will try to guess the name of the program you wish to launch. If it finds more then one matching program, a list of matching programs will be printed on the screen. Type the name of the program from the list and press Enter to launch. Whichever way you choose, launching a program is a simple affair with &kde;. From the &kmenu;, to &konsole;, all your programs are just a few clicks or key-presses away. Check the &kicker; handbook for more information on enabling or disabling the &kmenu;, adding applications to the quick launch, or on organizing the categorization of the applications in the &kmenu;. You can view the &kicker; handbook either via the &khelpcenter; or by using &konqueror;'s KIOslave by typing help:/kicker in the Location toolbar. &programs-controlling; Christian Weickhmann christian.weickhmann@gmx.de &kde; provides a unified way to open or save files via the file dialog. In almost every &kde; program you will find a FileOpen and File Save (and/or Save As...) entry. This dialog consists of between three and five areas. The top area is where you find the navigation and configuration functions. The main area (in the middle) is where all your files are being displayed as icons. This is called an icon view. The bottom area is where you can edit filename or filter expressions and say Save or Open. In addition to that you can add two even more sophisticated areas: the Quick Access Navigation Panel and the Preview Panel. Next to the three navigation buttons (one directory up, back and forward) and the new folder button there is the bookmarks menu. Here you can mark any folder you visit often to find it quickly. The wrench icon holds the different functions to sort your files by name, date or size and to enable the two extra panels mentioned above. Next to it you can type the directory and choose (on the very right side) the encoding. You'll find the icon view in the middle of the dialog. You will find most of the navigation functions in the context menu by clicking on the items or the background with the right mouse button. The bottom of the dialog consists of the address field holding the file name you chose or typed in and the maybe most powerful tool: The filter. Here you can make the icon view display only items that match the criteria you define. Try filtering files whose names contain air by typing *air* into the filter field. The Quick Access Panel (activate it by typing the F9 key on your keyboard or through the wrench icon on top of the dialog) provides configurable shortcuts to frequently used locations on your hard drive or even on the Internet. There are several preconfigured locations such as your home directory. Try right clicking on any item to configure it or to empty space to add a new entry. You will be shown a context menu. Here you can choose the icon size and to add, modify or rename any entry. Choose Add Entry and you will see a window containing anything you need: Type your description, enter the location (or choose it via the dialog opening by clicking on the folder symbol), choose a symbol from a vast variety in the symbol dialog opening when you click on the predefined icon (usually a simple folder symbol). The Preview area (activate it by typing the F11 key on your keyboard or via the wrench icon on top of the dialog) makes it easy to preview almost any file on your filesystem. Images will be displayed as thumbnails. Usually also sound files (such as MP3, Ogg or Wave-Files), text files (among them raw text, PDF and &HTML;) and even video files (MPG, AVI and so on) will be previewed. Note that large files might take a long time to be previewed (⪚ scaled down if they are large images). You can disable automatic previews by unselecting Automatic Preview below the preview. You can still preview individual files: just click Preview. You can also disable previews for files above a certain size. Go to &kcontrolcenter;, choose KDE componentsFile manager, go to the Preview and Metafiles tab and change the Maximum Filesize value. &Philip.Rodrigues; Configuration Customization &kde; applications are intended to be as useful and usable as possible out of the box, but they also offer a wide range of options which you can change to make &kde; work for you. As well as the settings which affect the whole of &kde; (see ), each application has a set of configuration options, which you can access using the menu option SettingsConfigure Application . This is the same for all &kde; applications, which makes it easy to find the configuration dialog for an application. On the left of the configuration dialog is a list of sections. Clicking on one of these sections displays the configuration page for that section on the right-hand side of the dialog. You can change these options to fit your preferences. When you have made the changes you want, you can click on OK to save your changes and close the configuration dialog. If you want to see the effect of your changes, but not close the configuration dialog, click on the Apply button. This is useful if you aren't sure about the change you've made, and might want to change back, because the dialog is still open, ready for you to do so. If you decide that you don't want to keep the changes you've made, just click Cancel to close the dialog without saving your changes. Shortcuts Keybindings Most &kde; applications offer keyboard shortcuts for the main actions in the application. If you find that you don't like the default keyboard shortcuts, or that they conflict with the shortcuts of another application (maybe one that's not part of &kde;), you can change them with the SettingsConfigure Shortcuts... menu entry. This brings up the Configure Shortcuts dialog for the application. As an example of how to use this dialog, let's add a shortcut for the Send Link Address... action to &konqueror;, so that we can email the locations of interesting pages to friends just by hitting a key (or two): Open the Configure Shortcuts dialog in &konqueror;, as described above. Click on the Send Link Address... item in the main listbox (it's near the bottom, in the Konqueror section). In the Shortcut for Selected Action panel, select Custom, since we are going to give this action a keyboard shortcut that we have chosen. A small shortcut entry dialog pops up. Just hit &Ctrl;E (or whatever you want to change the shortcut to), and the dialog disappears. The key icon in the Configure Shortcuts dialog now shows the new shortcut. If you made a mistake, or change your mind about what to use as the shortcut, just click on the key icon showing the current shortcut. The shortcut entry dialog reappears, and you can press the key combination for the shortcut you want. Notifications Sounds Something about SettingsConfigure Notifications... . Adriaan de Groot Nearly every &kde; application has one or more toolbars at the top of the application window, underneath the menu. The toolbar contains icons (toolbar buttons) that represent commonly used actions and configuration settings. The &kmail; window, for instance, has a toolbar that contains buttons for New Message, Check Mail and several others. Each of these actions is something you do often, so that's why they have toolbar buttons as well as menu entries (New Message is under MessageNew Message, Check Mail is FileCheck Mail). Not everybody agrees on what actions are commonly used, though, (I never use the New Message toolbar button or the menu item, I use the keyboard shortcut &Ctrl;N). To ensure that your screen isn't cluttered with things you don't need, each toolbar can be customized. Additionally, you can usually customize which toolbars are displayed and how, as well. The easiest thing to customize with the toolbars of any given application is whether they are displayed at all. Most applications have a SettingsToolbars menu where you can select which toolbars are displayed and which are not. &konqueror; has four toolbars, Main, Extra, Location and Bookmark. It can be convenient to turn off the Bookmark toolbar to save screen space. To do so, click on the Settings menu, choose Toolbars, and then uncheck the Bookmark Toolbar entry (do this just by clicking on the menu item). If there is no Settings menu, you can also right click on the toolbar itself, and choose the Toolbars sub-menu from the resulting context menu. The same Toolbar context menu, accessed by right clicking on the toolbar, allows you to customize other properties of the toolbar: Its orientation, so that instead of appearing at the top of the window under the menu bar you can place it on the left, right or bottom of the window. Its orientation, so that the toolbar floats as a separate window which you can move independently. Its orientation, so that the toolbar is squashed into a little flat grip that you can re-open by double-clicking on it (this is subtly different from making the toolbar vanish completely, since it it easier to cause it to re-appear). The appearance of text alongside, underneath, or instead of the icons on the toolbar. The size of the icons (if they are not supplanted by text). The toolbar is intended for actions that you perform often, so what do you do if there is some useless icon there, like Cut? Or what if you really want a cut button on the toolbar, but the application doesn't give you one? This is where the customize toolbars dialog comes in — it give you complete control over the actions that are available on each toolbar. Choose SettingsConfigure Toolbars from the application's menu, or Configure Toolbars from the context menu of the toolbar itself. This displays the configure toolbars dialog, which consists of a combobox with which you can select which toolbar to customize, and two lists of items — one of the available actions, and one of the actions that are already in use on the toolbar. Often there are many many more actions available ( activate tab #12, for instance) than you would ever want on the toolbar, or even that you know exist in the application. The customize toolbar dialog can be a learning experience. You can drag actions from one list box to the other, rearrange the items on the toolbar , or change the icon for a selected action. This allows you to drag the actions you don't want off of the toolbar and into the list of available actions; similarly, the actions you do want can be dragged into the toolbar. Clicking OK in the dialog immediately updates the toolbar with your new preferred actions. There are a few special items that can end up in the listbox for the current toolbar: separators, which exist in two flavors: line separator appears as a line between two action icons separator appears as a larger space between two action icons <Merge>, which is a special item that allows plugins and other loadable components of the application to insert their actions into the toolbar as well. It is generally not a good idea to remove this, since you cannot get it back. ActionList:, these appear in various flavors (there is a viewmode_toolbar one in &konqueror;) and again these represent lists of actions that might be inserted by plugins. Whenever you click on an action in the list of current actions, a description of it is shown in the dialog. This description will warn you if it is a bad idea to remove the action. If you do not like to drag things around, there are four buttons in the middle of the dialog which allow you to move the selected action from one list to the other, and to move a selected current action up or down in the list. There must be a way to restore the default toolbars in an application, in order to recover from accidentally deleting an important action like <Merge>, but I don't know what it is.