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KDE applications
What follows is a brief description of a few of the base KDE applications.
Fundamental Applications:
- Konqueror
KDE's file manager, web browser, FTP client and much more. Konqueror is the canvas for all the latest KDE technology, from KIO slaves (which provide mechanisms for file access) to component embedding, allowing it to be a universal viewing application, capable of displaying various image files as well as documents.
View the handbook by typing
help:/konquerorin Konqueror's Location Toolbar, or by selecting it in KHelpCenter.
- Kate
KDE's advanced multi-view text editor. Kate is excellent for things such as viewing the HTML source of a webpage to handling advanced coding in C++, PHP and XML with its powerful syntax highlighting engine and code folding capabilities. Kate is a very speedy application, being capable of opening huge text files in a matter of seconds, as well as allowing you to view a hefty amount of multiple views in order to see more instances of the same document and/or more documents at any particular time.
- Konsole
The X terminal emulator for KDE. Konsole, like many KDE applications, is extremely customizable; while you can create your own user sessions, you can also of course open Linux® console sessions, shell sessions, as well as standard
rootand sudo sessions.- Kicker
The KDE Panel, used for handling your currently running applications, a pager allowing you to switch between desktops, quick launch buttons to act as application launchers and much more.
- kdcop
A GUI front-end to the powerful DCOP (Desktop COmmunications Protocol). DCOP provides a comprehensive protocol for interprocess communication between KDE applications. While this is increasingly useful to KDE programmers, it is also beneficial to the ordinary user who would want to create a script, or, say, a SuperKaramba theme.
- KControl
The control center for the K Desktop Environment. You can alter a myriad of different things, ranging from themes, fonts and screensavers, to Internet, security and system administration.
- KHelpCenter
The KDE help system is used to provide access to the base UNIX® help pages (man or info) as well as the native KDE documentation provided by the KDE documentation team or the application authors. You should be able to access all of the KDE application handbooks from here.
Related Information
As you may have noticed, a wealth of information is accessible from the respective handbooks themselves, which can be accessed either by using the help KIO slave in Konqueror (that is, type
help:/in the Location toolbar), or by selecting it in the KHelpCenter.application
Personal Information Management
KDE PIM (Personal Information Manager) is a sub-project of KDE, and it aims to provide an application suite to manage personal information. It has several components, but these can all be brought under one application -- Kontact, which is the personal information manager. Below is an overview of a few of its popular components; that is, a few of the applications that integrate into it.
- Kontact
This serves as the medium by which the rest of the applications in KDE PIM can integrate with one another. All of the applications in KDE PIM can be displayed inside here, and you can easily choose which ones to display. It also contains a Summary page by which you can get a brief overview of events and information in the other components.
View the handbook by typing
help:/kontactin Konqueror's Location Toolbar, or by selecting it in KHelpCenter.
- KMail
The mail component. KMail comes with full IMAP, POP3 and SMTP support. Signing and encrypting of emails is permitted, and there are many comprehensive anti-spam functions available. A spell check can easily be used, HTML emails can be viewed appropriately, and there is an advanced search feature.
- KOrganizer
A fully customizable organizer which constitutes as the calender component. KOrganizer provides management of events and tasks, alarm notification, web export, network transparent handling of data, group scheduling, import and export of calendar files, and much more.
- KAddressBook
The contacts component. KAddressBook enables you to manage your contacts efficiently and comfortably; contacts can be easily exported and imported from a plethora of different address book standards, and it can be efficiently integrated with Kopete, KDE's multi-protocol instant messenger. Other features include support for all international character sets and advanced search functions.
- KNotes
A handy component which can serve to handle all your digital sticky notes. You can have them displayed on your desktop, they can be “dragged n' dropped” into emails, printed, or even be displayed after Kontact is closed down.
- KNode
The newsreader component. It is GNSKA (The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval) compliant, has support for MIME and multiple servers.
- Akregator
A lightweight and fast program to display news items provided by feeds, supporting all commonly used versions of RSS and Atom feeds. Useful features include searching in article titles, management of feeds in folders and setting archiving preferences.
Graphics
KDE has several graphics-related applications, ranging from PDF viewers to applications enabling you to take screenshots. Below is a delineation, as well as some related links, for a few of them.
- KColorEdit
A small and handy application for editing color palettes, as well as color choosing and naming. Colors can be chosen by giving the RGB hex code, by choosing the color from a myriad of different colors in the program, or even by grabbing the precise color of any particular thing on your screen.
- KPDF
An advanced PDF viewer, based on xpdf, for KDE. KPDF contains a number of ways to search through the document (standard find dialog, thumbnail filter, etc.) and has other features such as hands-free reading.
- KView
An image viewer program which supports a number of different image filetypes including JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF and many others. Kview has full integration with KDE and it can be embedded into Konqueror for viewing image files on your diskdrive as well as your FTP site or webserver, using its URL open support. Other features include a few image manipulations such as zoom, rotate, grayscale and flip.
- KSnapshot
An application for taking screenshots. It is capable of capturing images of the whole desktop, a single window, or a selected region. The images can then be saved in a variety of formats, including JPG and PNG.
- KolourPaint
A simple and easy-to-use paint program, with features such as basic painting (drawing diagrams and finger painting), image manipulation and icon editing.
- Kooka
An intuitive raster image scan program. Kooka helps you to handle the most important scan parameters, find the correct image file format to save and manage your scanned images.
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- Reference: The KDE User Guide, F. Giannaros