On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Will Stephenson
On Saturday 05 December 2009 16:43:04 Mark Goldstein wrote:
It was easy in KDE3 - right click on panel, select "Add Application to Panel" -> "Add Non-KDE Application". Then you could adjust it, e.g. select some appropriate icon instead of default one. This action added "ExecButton" section to kickerrc.
I could not find such possibility in KDE4 (4.3.3). ...
First add the non-menu item to the menu using kmenuedit (or right click on the K menu icon->Menu Editor) then drag the resulting icon from the menu as usual.
If you don't want the icon in the menu, you can then remove it again with kmenuedit - it will stay in the panel. This is because adding an item to the menu creates a .desktop file for it in .local/share/applications, and adding it to the user's menu that is merged with the system menu structure to make the menu you see, whereas removing it just removes the entry from the user menu, not the .desktop file.
Thank you very much Will, this way it works.
See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163831 . The intention was to replace having a menu item for everything (the 'KDE 3 has too many options' meme) with drag and drop where possible, and the implementation of this for non-.desktop-file-owning binaries has always been minimal.
The drag from /usr/bin in a file manager to panel you tried first should create a .local/share/applications .desktop file that has fully editable attributes instead of just creating a link to the binary as you discovered. I've proposed this in the bug but tell if you can think of a better approach.
I think this would be a good solution. BTW, there is some "side effect" with the specific application I've added that way (and when I created .desktop file manually and dragged it to the panel). On one machine it was OK. But on the other (where I initially played with dragging/dropping from /usr) I observe the following: when the mouse cursor hovers over one of the "minimize/maximize/close" buttons of the application window, the button disappears. For other windows the buttons change their color. Looks like some "window-specific" effect. I have full screen-shots, but do not want to attach 300K to this mail, so just "cropped" the interesting fragment where you can see "maximize" button, tool-tip for "minimize" button and a weak shadow square where the minimize button should be. -- Mark Goldstein