Raiden's Realm: The Applets of KDE

The Applets of KDE - Part 1 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Sep 14, 2007 at 01:49pm
Section: Software
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By proper definition, an Applet is a little program that serves a specific purpose and fills a minor or niche need within your system. These items may not be thought of very often due to their small presence and limited scope on the system, but they’re no less important than your office suite or some of the other bigger, more complex and better known software you use. In this article series, I hope to look at each of these in some level of detail to help you to get a better idea of what’s available to you in KDE and how you can benefit from each of these. So let’s jump in and see what’s out there.

Klipper

Klipper is the included KDE clipboard utility. It’s job is to take the native clipboard in Xwindows and supercharge it. By default, the Xwindows clipboard has two levels, one for copying text that has been selected and one for text that has been manually copied by pressing “ctrl-c”. This effectively creates two levels to the clipboard. Pasting is also separated into two levels because of this. This allows “ctrl-p” to paste one thing while center clicking your mouse would paste something else. Klipper is completely aware of this duality in the clipboard and can easily deal with it. Klipper also does something to the clipboard that is very useful. By default, the clipboard doesn’t have a history. If you copy something else, whatever you copied first would immediately be overwritten. Klipper can save up to 2048 unique entries in the clipboard, so even if you copied something three months ago, you could simply go back into the history and retrieve it. I’ve used this several times to find a variety of things stored in Klipper I had used several days earlier.

The first thing you’ll notice in your system tray when Klipper is enabled (if you’re not using it yet, you really, really should.) is an icon like this:

If you click on it, you’ll see something like this:

The Klipper menu is broken into two different parts. The first is the actual items you’ve copied, the second is the options for Klipper. Under the options section, the first item you’ll notice is “Enable Actions”. Actions in Klipper are rather interesting. There is a lot of things you can do with actions. For example, if you copied a URL to the clipboard and then you went into Klipper, you’d have the ability to select from a menu of options such as “Send to Konqueror” or “Open with Firefox” which would allow you to send that one particular clipboard item to the program of your choice. You can also do special actions on that particular clipboard entry using regular expressions.

The next three options are pretty self explanatory. The control center for Klipper has a series of options you can configure, including actions and global shortcuts. By default, Klipper only holds 7 clipboard entries, but you can change it to whatever you want up to 2048 as mentioned earlier. You can also unify the clipboard by making select work just like “ctrl-c”. You can also make it ignore the selection so that only “ctrl-c” works, a behavior similar to the Windows clipboard. There’s a lot more this nifty little applet can do, but I’ve only touched the surface. If you’re not already using it, give it a try.

Kmix

Kmix is the KDE volume control manager. While every single OS out there has some kind of volume control manager, Kmix does the controls in a logical, and well constructed manor. Calling it a mixer though is a bit misleading as it doesn’t actually “mix” anything by the proper definition as there’s no equalizer or effects controls. Just the basic controls you’d expect in a volume control. It does however have gain controls in case you need them, but that’s it. One thing that Kmix does do very well that no other volume control manager does to my best knowledge, is that it divides your sound by input and output and then separates it further by device, port, and source.

Knotes

Knotes is KDE’s sticky notes program. Designed to look somewhat like 3M’s sticky notes program, it provides you with the ability to create and store sticky notes on your computer. This is handy for quite a variety of reasons. For example, if you needed to store dates and times, url’s, notes on something, or a wide variety of things, including sharing notes between machines. Knotes also includes an actions feature, although it’s limited to just sending notes to your favorite mail program. The notes sharing is rather interesting in that it allows you to send and receive notes to and from other people on your network or the internet who have Knotes setup to receive your notes.

You can also print your notes, or even set an alarm to remind you about one particular note in case you need to come back to it by a certain time.

Kmag

Kmag is a tool for magnifying your desktop to help you more easily see things that are there with are hard for you to see for some reason. Instead of having just one fixed size for magnification, there is quite a surprising number of resolutions available ranging from 5:1 (shrinks area under mouse) to 1:20 (super magnified). You can even change the refresh rate for the display (slow to very fast) and even adjust whether Kmag follows your mouse or just magnifies stuff in a given area. You can even change where it’s located at, how much screen space it takes up, and much more.

KmouseTool

This handy little program is very good for those who use a mouse, but find it difficult to click or double click the mouse for any given reason. Those with repetitive stress injuries will find this especially useful. Once configured, you just drag your mouse over something, make a pre-specified gesture, and let the toll do the rest of the work for you. This is also useful if you’re extremely lazy and don’t want to click. ;)

Kcalc

Everyone using a computer needs a calculator. Those using KDE are no different. But what’s so special about this particular calculator? Well, for one, all the features that come with it. Some calculators have a fair number of features. Kcalc has a lot of features and the kitchen sink. You can set constants for all your calculations, or use one of nearly twenty included constants instead including Pi, Light Speed, Earth Acceleration and more. You can also add or remove several different sets of buttons including ones for Science and Engineering, Statistic, Logic and Constants. The wide number of mathematical functions you can do with this is really quite impressive.

Ktip

You’ve probably seen this rather interesting program at least once while using KDE, and like most people, you probably turned it off and told it never to show tips at startup again. But in turn you would have shut off a really useful program that can provide you with tons of very useful tips. While you don’t need it on all the time, browsing through it periodically can be very helpful. Not only might you learn something new, but you could also learn a few new tricks that will make your KDE experience much better. Think of it like a learning aid. The more you use it, the more proficient you’ll become at KDE.

Ark

Ark is to KDE what Winrar is to Windows. It’s a file archiving tool that puts a graphical frontend on all of Linux’s most powerful archiving tools. It handles such popular formats as tar, Gzip, Bzip, LHA, Java, Zip, Rar and quite a number of others. It’ll even create or extract Debian packages should you feel the need to do so. The file browsing interface when viewing an archive is quite useful and applies a simplified tree view to the file contents allowing you to see what files and folders are in an archive at a single glance. You can even edit archives, add or delete files, and even repack them if the archive format permits. You can even quick view files from within an archive if you ever need to. It’s also integrated directly into KDE, so if you ever need it, you can right click on a file or folder and tell KDE to use Ark to archive the files. It’s definitely the tool to have when archiving or extracting files.

Conclusion

Well, that's it for this part of our look at the applets of KDE. In part two I hope to cover even more exciting and interesting applets that exist natively in KDE that you will find interesting and very useful. KDE is a desktop environment and window manager that has nearly everything you'll ever need in one package which is part of what makes it so great.

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