While writing a post, I wanted to link a simple tutorial for creating custom keyboard shortcuts in KDE. However I couldn’t find a single tutorial! So here is one:

  1. Hit Alt+F2 (or your custom shortcut for the Run Dialog)
  2. Enter System Settings to start up the tool
  3. Double Click on Shortcuts and Gestures under Application appearance and Behavior
  4. Click on Edit towards the bottom of the screen which opens a popup menu
  5. Navigate to New => Global Shorcut => Command/URL and left click on Command/URL
  6. Change the default name New Action to anything of your choice
  7. Go to the Trigger tab and click on None and press a key combination of your choice
  8. Go to the Action tab and select/enter the path to the script/executable

Pictures speak louder than words..

Usually, when you open PDF files in Okular, it opens in the same okular window all the time. However there are times when you want to refer to more than one pdf file at the same time and would need multiple instances of the software to run. The way to get Okular to run unique instances is by firing it with the --unique argument.

okular --unique

You could also put this in your .bashrc or .bash_aliases if you want it as a permanent fix.

alias okular="okular --unique"

I like my desktop to look pretty and be efficient at the same time.  As I have pointed out in my earlier post, I shifted from Gnome to KDE when KDE 4.2 was released. Gnome was fast and efficient but never pretty (no not even with the Shiki Themes). KDE 4.2+ is both fast (enough) and pretty. My only grudge has been that a few gtk applications that I still use (wicd, ephiphany etc) and Firefox do not integrate well with KDE.Continue reading

Every so often, Plasma freezes on me or the graphics get cluttered. It is a hassle to restart KDE (logout/login) when you have 101 tabs open in Firefox and several xterm windows.

I had been a Gnome user since shifting to Ubuntu a couple years back, and recently shifted to Kubuntu/KDE when KDE 4.2 was released. Its been mostly stable, except for the occasional Plasma issues. Individual components in Gnome can be easily killed/restarted. For eg Gnome Panel can be killed/restarted using the following command.Continue reading