Will mean porting the config to QSettings and a separate file?

Yeah, maybe just kdedeveleopmentrc

Also we might want to make it less magic and have a public API to enable rather than putting breaking changes on apps.

The way I read the docs, it is just for developers. Do apps depend in any way on this feature being enabled?

The docs are very misleading.

But the core part of automatically adding accelerators to apps is something that's run for all applications. It adds the majority of &accelerators.

This is done regardless of any user settings inside the KCheckAccelerators constructor called from a Q_COREAPP_STARTUP_FUNCTION hook.

I have a feeling that it was meant to be a debug tool, and everyone was meant to call KAcceleratorManager::manage manually. But due to a bug this debug tool is always doing it, and now everyone relies on it.

In T12208#267910, @davidedmundson wrote:

The docs are very misleading.

But the core part of automatically adding accelerators to apps is something that's run for all applications. It adds the majority of &accelerators.

This is done regardless of any user settings inside the KCheckAccelerators constructor called from a Q_COREAPP_STARTUP_FUNCTION hook.

I have a feeling that it was meant to be a debug tool, and everyone was meant to call KAcceleratorManager::manage manually. But due to a bug this debug tool is always doing it, and now everyone relies on it.

I had that same suspicion about it being used automatically to resolve accelerators conflicts, but couldn't verify it/pin it down, thanks for the confirmation :)