Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 5, KDE Desktop

#41 Make KDE Even Easier to Use

HACK

The next line is a bit tricky. Each time you launch an instance of kwrite,it

gets a DCOP listing with a number attached to it. You want to address the

most recently launched copy of kwrite, so the script runs dcop to list all

DCOP applications, finds all the applications that match “kwrite,” sorts the

list, and picks the last entry. That entry’s name is assigned to the variable

$kwid. This works even if this is the first instance of kwrite you have

launched.

Then the script issues a few DCOP instructions. It automatically enters the

first line of a typical bash script, #!/bin/bash, after which it enters two more

blank lines and moves the cursor to the last blank line.

Now create the bash script that gets you started writing a Python script. The

only difference between /usr/local/bin/writeBashScript and /usr/local/bin/

writePythonScript is that you will insert the first line as the full path to your

Python interpreter instead of

#!/bin/bash. That line of code should look like

this:

dcop $kwid EditInterface#1 insertText 0 0 '#!/usr/bin/python'

Obviously, there’s no limit to the kinds of templates you can create for vari-

ous scripting languages.

These examples barely scratch the surface of what you can do. You can cre-

ate a single menu entry that lets you select a half dozen directories, tar and

compress them, and burn them to a multisession ...