smoothenator

The weather outside today is truly bizarre: it can't figure out if it wants to be late winter or early spring and so it's raining sometimes and snowing others (often switching back and forth within a 15 minute period), melting then freezing ... Makes being outside a bit annoying as it's slush and ice and snow and mud puddles and ...

In other words, a perfect day to stay inside and hack on things. ;)

One of the recent, though smaller, changes made to theming in Plasma for 4.3 is the ability to tell all the buttons, checkboxes, comboboxes, etc that Plasma provides in libplasma to use the native style painting instead of Plasmafying them. This is controlled by the theme, as it doesn't make sense with themes like Oxygen or Air due to SVG and color compatibility of the native widgets with the rest of the theme. In the theme's metadata.desktop file the author can put a section that looks like this:


[Settings]
UseNativeWidgetStyle=true


to get native widget styles. This will allow people to make truly boring themes for Plasma so we can all reminisce about the good old days when the QStyle made your panel look dreadful and we liked it that way! ;) More seriously, I'm sure it'll make visual conservatives like Lubos a bit more happy. Now we just need a theme that uses this.

Over in KRunner land, building on wilder's work from last night I added a feature I'd previously vetoed as it would have gotten in the way of getting the thread scheduling sorted out. Runners can now check to see if they are still processing a meaningful query (as in, "the user hasn't continued typing and left us behind") and return early. This tends to save some CPU cycles for people who type fast relative to the available CPU horsepower and makes KRunner go a bit smoother.

It's only 11:00 am, so I've got lots of time for more happyness. Next I'm going to add "Run Command" to the Computer tab in Kickoff so people can get to KRunner with just the mouse and then start on a Plasmoid that uses RunnerManager just like KRunner does so we can put it on our panel or desktop or dashboard or .. well, wherever Plasma goes. :)

Yay for bad weather days. :)