KDE: Keeping on digging

It's sunday, incredibly early in the morning. I have to wait at least 2 hours before to take my first coffee injection at a decent hour... And what am I doing? I'm blogging. That's my nephew fault. He interrupted me yesterday when I was just starting. Well, here we go again! ;-)

It appears it's possible to blog on Blogger with Konqueror. I changed some settings in Blogger's --misbehaving-- interface and here is the miracle. There's a little bug in the page display but at least I can type in the form. I can even use Konqueror dictionary. There will be no orthographical errors any more, only grammatical ones. The other improvement is the font in the form which is now a monospaced one. Definitively more legible that what Blogger or Firefox imposed me.

Back to digging. My style handles a new widget: the toolbox tabs. I don't know much apps which use toolboxes. KDevelopDesigner and Krita are the examples that come to my mind. I know that I also a toolbox with only one tab somewhere yesterday but I can't remember where. For those who don't know what a toolbox is, it a frame with tabs the ones above the others acting like drawers. When you select a tab, its content appears just below and the previously opened drawer is automatically closed.

I definitively didn't like the look of these widgets which reminded me so much of those QShadeThingies with bright and dark lines. Now the toolbox tabs look like the other tabs. I made just a few cosmetic adjustments and the result isn't that bad considering the very few freedom Qt gives us with these widgets.

Oh yeah! That's it. I stumbled on some ants of the Qt species. I was saying that Qt's anthill is a very quiet one but when Qt ants close their mandibles around something, there's no way to make them change their mind AFAIK. They're more than stubborn.

In this case, that's because too many things are hardcoded and not sent to the style to deal with. First, there is a QToolBoxTab widget (somewhere deep in Qt) but no QToolBoxTabLabel. The label is aligned on the left --even though it should be aligned on the right for a RightToLeft script. Don't even think of centering the label. The only way is through a patch to Qt... and I don't want (yet) everybody to have to re-compile Qt and KDE to install my style. ;-) That QToolBoxTab widget is also so deep in Qt's anthill that there's no (reasonable) way to let it react to mouseover. So it has the look but only half of the behaviors of a regular tab. That's all I could do and I don't see much improvement for the time being since somebody cut and pasted this widget into Qt4 --including the left alignment. I should probably say I'm satisfied I was able to change the look and remove the bold effect on the label? Well, I'm not. I'm only frustrated.

Maybe should I have my first caffeine injection right now... to stand the 203rd rerun of Alf. ;-) Let's go...