Make Dolphin's and Kate's terminal shortcuts and behaviour consistent
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Both apps are inconsistent:

  • Dolphin has no keyboard method to focus/de-focus an open terminal panel
  • Kate has no keyboard method to close an open terminal panel.

With F4 pressed

  • both Dolphin and Kate open the terminal

With F4 pressed again

  • Dolphin closes the terminal
  • Kate defocus the terminal

Bug: 414587

alexde created this task.Dec 4 2019, 10:29 AM
sars added a subscriber: sars.Dec 4 2019, 12:26 PM

I was actually wondering why the F4 shortcut was put to Focus/Defocus Terminal and not to the "Show Terminal" action. The later action works the same as Dolphin (except that the focus to the terminal got broken at some point this fall or summer).

I would like F4 to be moved to "Show Terminal" (and fix the focus problem)

You can achieve Dolphin's behavior by reassigning the F4 shortcut to View > Tool Views > Show/Hide Konsole. That's what I do since > 10 years, and it works perfectly. Why is it not the default? Maybe because this action does not exist by default (i.e. when the Konsole plugin is not loaded). But the right fix is to reassign the F4 shortcut to this action.

In T12318#212731, @sars wrote:

I was actually wondering why the F4 shortcut was put to Focus/Defocus Terminal and not to the "Show Terminal" action. The later action works the same as Dolphin (except that the focus to the terminal got broken at some point this fall or summer).

I would like F4 to be moved to "Show Terminal" (and fix the focus problem)

the focus problem was already fixed; see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411181

I agree that F4 should show and hide the Konsole panel in both apps. Then maybe we should assign a separate focus/defocus terminal panel shortcut, in both apps.

I just landed an old patch of mine that adds a dedicated "focus/de-focus terminal panel" action to Dolphin: D10959

So now Dolphin opens and closes the panel with F4, and focuses/de-focuses it with Ctrl++F4. Perhaps Kate should do the same thing for consistency's sake.

ngraham claimed this task.Dec 7 2019, 10:39 PM
ngraham moved this task from Backlog to In Progress on the Kate board.
ngraham moved this task from Reported to Apps Implementation on the Goal: Consistency board.
gregormi added a subscriber: gregormi.EditedDec 22 2019, 11:34 AM

I am a little late but I would like to add something. In Kate - at least for me - the by far most used action is "Focus/defocus Terminal". This function also opens the terminal if it was not open before.

"Show Terminal" opens and closes the terminal panel (without closing the actual shell). Currently, it does not change the focus to the terminal, so it is of little use in a workflow where one wants to switch from code to terminal regularly. So, I would suggest to combine the Show/Hide Terminal function with the Focus function. This would have two benefits:

  • Show Terminal would enable the user to immediately type to the terminal
  • Hide Terminal would maximize the text editor space because it closes the panel (in contrast to just Defocus).

Dolphin would also benefit from this subtle change in behaviour. Would it have any drawbacks?

"Show/hide Terminal" should definitely move focus to the terminal when the terminal first opens. If it doesn't, that's a bug that should be fixed.

Maybe what we need is the following actions:

  • Open/focus/defocus terminal
  • Close terminal

@Gregor: That the terminal does not get focus on show was a regression in konsole part and should be fixed. I don't think there is any action item left for now.