Konsole is the app that probably almost every KDE developer uses on a daily basis, but there hasn’t been much development on the user interface front during the last releases. The two brave souls Robert Knight and Kurt Hindenburg are busy triaging and fixing bugs. So to say Konsole is more maintained than developed due to a simple lack of manpower. Nonetheless some recent changes may be worth blogging about.

Konsole does a brilliant job at being a terminal emulator but it doesn’t follow user interface standards set by the majority of KDE apps very well. The remainder of this post is mostly about the menu bar and popup menus. Generally, Konsole is forced to apply to the scheme CTRL+SHIFT+Shortcut where other apps would use only CTRL+Shortcut because apps in the terminal might want to use those. Up until now Konsole had it’s very own idea about shortcuts and accelerators. For example, if you wanted to open another tab, you had to do CTRL+SHIFT+N where it should actually be CTRL+SHIFT+T. There are other examples but all those should be fixed by now. Furthermore the menus gained some rearrangements. If you’re a heavy user of Konsole profiles, you may appreciate that they don’t pollute the file menu any more:



As a small bonus, your default profile now shows the ‘favorite’ emblem 🙂 As you can see, the view menu was streamlined, the actions ‘Show Menubar’ and ‘Full Screen Mode’ where moved where they belong to: into the settings menu.





You may notice that the ‘Scrollback’ menu went into nirvana. This was simply needed because it grouped the ‘find’ actions (better put into the edit menu), ‘Save Output’ (went to the file menu) and some options stuff that should rather be found in the settings menu. Also, a popup menu for Konsole’ custom tab bar was added recently by Kurt: However, this may probably be merged soon with the popup menu that you get when you right click inside the terminal session:



All these are mostly small changes on the road to a refreshed Konsole experience, so for now we’d like to get some feedback on how you like these and what parts of Konsole may be improved further UI-wise. Here’s a partial TODO list to make it an even better KDE citizen: