www.michael-jansen.biz

With kde 4.2 my first big kde contribution went live. The khotkeys redesign. It was unfinished and users complained. Most complains - or should i say the loudest? - were about the incomplete mouse gesture support. The lament didn't stop. Then Frank Roscher came around and offered a tool name easystroke as a replacement for khotkeys and the ease was restored. Partially.

When i got the khotkeys gesture support working again in trunk the same guy sent me a patch implementing easystrokes gestures algorithm in khotkeys. Nice surprise. Apparently easystrokes author not only offers it's software for free ... no he also provides a detailed explanation of the algorithm used. That's the spirit! Since easystrokes algorithm is superior to khotkeys old one it was a no brainer to accept the patch. He even added an migration from the old algorithm to the new.

So with 4.3 the mouse gesture support in kde is back. But the documentation for khotkeys is miserable. So it's not easy to guess how mouse gestures work. Perhaps someone out there is willing to write some documentation. I'm bad at doing that. As you will shortly notice.

Groups can have conditions. A condition is something along the line "There is a window named xyz", "The window with title xyz is active". No condition means always true. Have a look at the "Konqueror Gestures" for an example. All gestures in that group will only work if the condition is met. And the condition is that a konqueror window is active. What a surprise!

To start a gesture you must press a mouse button. Click on Settings to configure which. When pressing the mouse button khotkeys follows your moves. After you release the mouse button khotkeys will try to match your gesture against its database. If a match is found the associated action is executed. Again have a look at the Konqueror examples which work perfectly. For me. In case of troubles open a bug.

Mike