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Subsections

General presentation of KDE

What exactly is KDE?

In order to understand KDE, it is first of all necessary to realize the fact that it is made up of several truly distinct "logical components":

.: Window manager (kwm): responsible for the appearance of the windows and their behaviour.
.: Sophisticated tool bar (kpanel), comprising the K menu, buttons for virtual desktops, other menus and shortcuts, the "dock panel" and... a clock!
.: Sophisticated file manager: KFM (K File Manager), which also handles the desktop icons in the screen background.

KDE is also a sort of standard for all K programs which communicate between one another ("drag-drop", "copy-paste" etc.).

Therefore this all forms a coherent, complete, powerful and agreeable environment allowing efficient work.

A KDE base screen is made up of several elements.

**Figure:** a KDE screen
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From top to bottom:

.: the task bar. Each X application launched under KDE is symbolised in the task bar by its name and an icon, as under Windows(tm). Thus, at any moment, you can jump from one application to another by simply clicking on a button in the task bar.
.: The desktop shortcuts: by default, there are already many of these (for example, the trash can, the "home" directory etc.). You can create your own shortcuts yourself, for example by dragging and copying an icon in the directory "Gabarit" onto the desktop, then right-button clicking on the new icon to configure its properties. Icons which are not useful can be deleted by dragging them into the trash can (if you want to be able to recover them afterwards), or simply right-button clicking on them and choosing "delete".
.: The tool bar (configurable in the menu K>Panneau>Configurer). You can drop one or more desktop icons there. The "K" menu can be found there which itself contains sub-menus for a large number of X applications present on your system. On the far right is a small clock. If you leave the mouse pointer over the clock, the date will appear as well. Finally, there are some buttons which allow you to pass from one workspace to another, to quit KDE or "block" the screen.

In order to be clear, the windows themselves comprise buttons:

**Figure:** KDE buttons...
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Each window can be:

Next: The file manager KFM Up: The graphics suite KDE Previous: The graphics suite KDE Contents

1999-01-27