Leftovers: KDE
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A Usability Guy’s Journey to Creating his First KDE Tool – Part 1: Baby Steps
These two may sound completely unrelated at first, but they both were key in sending me down this path. This article will tell the story behind 1, which is about my very first code commit to KDE. I will go into quite some detail because I feel that my journey may provide some insights for KDE.
This story started on April 6th. I was discussing with Aleix Pol about actual vs. perceived performance in Plasma and other KDE software. One thing we agreed on was that animation speed has a big impact on perceived performance. During that discussion, we found out that the setting for the animation speed is almost impossible to find in System Settings, because it sits in a module where you would not expect it to be (Display and Monitor > Compositor), and searching for “animation speed” points you to the wrong module (this was due to an oversight when the “Desktop Effects” module was split in two and the search keywords were not adapted). The “it sits in an unexpected module” problem is about to be fixed by moving it into the “Workspace behavior” module, but first I wanted the actual bug with the search pointing to the wrong module to be fixed.
At first, as usual, I wrote a bug report about it. Then, Aleix, being a cunning little Spaniard (*scnr*, I know you’re Catalonian), said these fateful words: “You could fix this one yourself!”. Now the cunning part was that he knew I could not defend myself by saying “But I don’t know C++ …” because the search keywords are defined in .desktop files, easily read- and writable for mere mortals like me. So, without any good argument why I couldn’t, I set out to fix it myself.
The first obstacle on my journey was that even after years of being a KDE contributor, I still did not have a KDE developer account. The reason is simple: My contributions usually come in the form of text and mockups, not code. I describe my ideas in wiki pages, emails, forum posts, chats, review requests, bug reports, blog posts, …, but not in repositories. For this simple patch, I could have just put it up on Reviewboard or Phabricator and have someone else commit it, but if I was going to contribute code, I wanted to do it properly™.
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It has happened!
I have been selected for the Google Summer of Code!
For the better part of the summer vacation, I will now be committing myself to write code for KDE to implement my project idea of implementing a virtual folder in Dolphin to make it easier to select files.
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GSoC project accepted, now what?
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