Final Okteta features for KDE 4.1

By becoming module coordinator for kdeutils I had to shift my time from hacking on Okteta to some module coordination. And that with the date of the hard feature freeze coming closer, oh well.

But the big cleanup of the module was finished just in time to get two more features done for Okteta:

• a strings extract tool
• an export facility

The first is roughly done, simply surprises me with new problems over and over. The latter is rushed in, ignoring some concepts I have with the Kakao framework, but works for now. And still has some smartness, as it reuses the encoder classes which are used for “Copy as…” (thanks to the QIODevice abstraction).

In the process I moved a very old, but well hidden feature to a visible place: the ability to copy the current selection as the view rendered to plain text. I still remember how I did it in 2003 in Nové Hrady, when I was new to all the KDE development, yet sitting in the same computer room with all the famous KDE guys, how exciting for me. I showed it there to Josef (Spillner), next to Tobias (König) one of my two leaders from Dresden. Besides him nobody might have ever noticed it, because you only triggered it if you dragged a selection from the value column of the Okteta part, which itself only a few might have used (KPilot generic database editor, KDevelop debugger view, …). Touching personal history, oh well… 🙂

Selecting the shown menu entry adds this to the clipboard, using all the settings of the view (except for “Show unprintable chars”, for a good reason):

0002:D0E0 |                 2F 68 6F  6D 65 2F 6B  6F 64 65 72 |      /home/koder
0002:D0F0 | 2F 4B 6F 64  65 2F 6B 64  65 73 76 6E  2F 74 72 75 | /Kode/kdesvn/tru
0002:D100 | 6E 6B 2F 4B  44 45 2F 62  75 69 6C 64  2E 64 65 62 | nk/KDE/build.deb
0002:D110 | 75 67 2F 6B  64 65 75 74  69 6C 73 2F  6F 6B 74 65 | ug/kdeutils/okte
0002:D120 | 74 61 2F 63  6F 72 65 2F  6F 6B 74 65  74 61 63 6F | ta/core/oktetaco
0002:D130 | 72 65 5F 61  75 74 6F 6D  6F 63 2E 63  70 70       | re_automoc.cpp  

There is one more feature I would have liked to get done for KDE 4.1, but which won’t make it now: support for very large files. Is rescheduled for KDE 4.2. Until then just do not load too large files! I should perhaps add a warning to the file selector.

Spring-cleaning of KDE Utils is done

Since the release of KDE 4.0.0 there have been quite some changes in the module kdeutils up to now:

Moved in:

• okteta
• printer-applet

Stayed:

• ark
• kcalc
• kcharselect
• kdessh
• kdf
• kfloppy
• kgpg
• ktimer
• kwallet
• superkaramba
• sweeper

Moved to kdepim:

• kjots

Moved to playground:

• kdelirc

Moved to unmaintained:

• klaptopdaemon (successor is worked on in playground)
• kmilo
• ksim
• charselectapplet (plasmoid already exists)
• khexedit (directory already contained only Okteta libs)

So if you miss one or the other program, now you know where to look.

The call for new maintainers was quite successfull. The only program left in kdeutils without an interested person is kdessh:

• Michael Zanetti now cares for kdelirc in playground, looking how to add a solid base.
• Sascha Peilicke, Troy Campbell et Bart Slootweg are having some thoughts about the future of KWallet, while Michael Leupold is already busy fixing the current codebase.
• Ben McDonald is looking to get a take on KRegExpEditor.
• Pino Toscano took over maintainership for Sweeper.
• Constantin Berzan is going for KCharSelect.
• Alex L. Spehr sees what she can do to KTimer.

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