With many X GUI's, the iconofy button (a little dot) will erase the window that the program is running in and create, instead, an icon on the desktop. KDE does not do this. Instead, when a window is ``iconified'' it is simply hidden (but the program is still running). There are two ways to get the window back: (1) If you're running the taskbar part of kpanel (see the Panel --> Configure menu entry), you can choose to have a list of tasks displayed on you desktop. Iconified tasks have their names surrounded by parenthesis. (2) If you click the middle mouse button on the root window, kwm will give you a list of all available tasks (and again, the names of iconified tasks are bracketed).
Like all kde applications, information about how to run kvt (the
UNIX option in kpanel) is stored in it's .kdelnk
file in the apps
directory of your KDEDIR
. To make it launch from icons or
kpanel with a login by default, just edit
KDEDIR/apps/Utilities/UNIX.kdelnk
and make it look something like
this:
[KDE Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=kvt -ls
Icon=UNIX.xpm
DocPath=kvt.html
Info=Terminal Emulation (kvt)
Terminal=0
Here's one way to do it, although there may be a more KDEish method (?).
We'll use the example of creating an entry for a news reader called knews
(it starts with a k, but it is not a KDE application). Fire up kfm and
create a directory called myapps inside your HOME/.kde
directory.
Change into this directory and select File --> New -->
Program.kdelnk
. Enter knews.kdelnk
for the name. A new item
will appear in the KDE window called knews
. Click on the icon with
the third mouse button and select properties from the pop-up menu. Click on
the Execute tab in the window that appears, and enter knews
in the
Execute input area. You can also choose a different icon here, select a
working directory, and so on. To make this new program entry available from
kpanel, just drag from the kfm window to the kpanel bar. Voila!
The KDE directory hierarchy (located under KDEDIR) includes a
directory called apps
. The layout of this directory is what kpanel
uses to create its menu structure. Thus, you must choose System -->
kdisplay
to run kdisplay because the kdisplay.kdelnk
file
exists in the System
sudirectory of KDEDIR/apps
. Any
change to this directory structure will alter the layout of kpanel's menu.
There are some additional icons available in the dev
directory of
the ftp site(s). Install these in KDEDIR/lib/pics/
to make them
available for use. If you think they're unattractive, then design really
nice ones and upload them.
All KDE applications ship with html documentation. It can be
accessed by selecting help from within the relevant application, running
kdehelp on its own, or by looking around in KDEDIR/doc/HTML/
.