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KDE is a bunch of guitarists
Q: How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Seven. One to change the lightbulb and six to stand around and go "yeah, I can do that."
That’s one of my favorite guitarist jokes — I play badly enough that I know most of the time I can’t do that, but hey. While the crux of the joke is that those saying they can, aren’t really up-to-snuff, I’ve been going "yeah, we can do that" a lot this week. Where "we" is various KDE applications or technologies. Perhaps they need a little more promo?
First there was this Ars Technica article on Terminator, to which the first comment was "yeah, Konsole can do that" (for years already, at that). And of course emacs, screen, and plenty of others. Makes me think of the way I use Konsole tabs, though. I tend to have one tab per thing-I’m-doing open, all in different directories; for programming projects I tend to have a source-editing and a compilation tab open. Editing means vi, unless I know I’m going to be at it all day, then there’s a Konsole tab from which I run Kate.
Oddly, I never use the window splitting feature; instead I rely on quick tab switching with alt-arrows and the activity indicators in the tabs themselves. I wonder if that’s something to add to the Konsole Userbase page, describing different ways of using Konsole efficiently? A collection of best practices, if you will, or suggested possible workflows with Konsole. That’s a useful addition to the handbook, I think.
Later — might have been via Glyn Moody’s endless twitter stream — I ran into Matt Zimmerman’s "Embracing the Web". Another "wait, what? we do that." To some extent, KDE’s project Silk aims to do just that. First-class web-apps on the desktop? Midgard does that, too with its deployment framework thingy (Henri may correct my pronounciation here). OwnCloud might fill the management gap, and GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) brings things from the web to the desktop. The other direction, I’m not so sure of.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what Matt is after, though. A bigger ecosystem of interoperable web applications (not just services) on a Free Software model (which implies license choices so that cooperation is fostered)? Sure, sign me up — mind that a combination of Quanta Plus (once ported to KDE4) and Silk is probably an awesome development platform and the pervasive support for HTML markup and Javascript in Plasma makes development of web-like applications locally a piece of cake.