KDE konsole 3.5 to 4.1 migration tips

As promised, I now try to provide what's necessary to happily migrate from KDE 3.5 konsole to KDE 4.1 konsole.

Unfortunately, when using konsole as tabbed multi-server ssh terminal, one will have to wait for at lease KDE 4.2, which might provide session management that might be a replacement for KDE3' konsoles. See KDE Bug #152761 for the discussion.

 Trying to clarify terms

Unfortunately, in trying to clarify things, KDE 4's konsole only mixed them through once again, but I am beginning to understand it:

konsole in KDE 3.5

konsole in KDE 4.1
bookmark
(to a directory)
bookmark
(with an URL like file:///home/jdoe/foo)
ssh session
(new tab with ssh command executed)

bookmark
(with an URL like ssh://login@server)

other session
(new tab with some command executed)
profile
(with the command)
profile
(konsole window with certain set of tabs)
bookmark folder
("open in tabs")
(does not work for ssh: bookmarks or commands!)
configuration
(menu "settings" / "configure konsole")
(contains colors, sessions, ...)
profiles
(configuration sets, each with a command, colors, behaviour)
 


Missing -ls option

In your profile(s), i.e. "Settings" / "Edit current profile" / tab "General" / field "Command", just append a space and -l to the shell command.

Converting old session entries to new something

No solution yet. I will wait what konsole from KDE 4.2 will provide. If a conversion script seems useful, I am gonna write and publish it.

 Replacement for "Send input to all sessions"

"Edit" / "Copy input to ..." is one click more of an effort, but in fact more flexible and a better protection agains weird things happening due to different command line editing modes.

Yes, you can't distribute e.g. keys like escape, control, alt, ..., but after all I assume that's a good thing.

Let's hope we have or get a long command history available. 

My solution: Old konsole under KDE 4

For now I am staying with the konsole from KDE 3.5. Fortunately, konsole seems to be quite independend and Ubuntu 8.04's konsole-4:3.5*.deb works under 8.10 beta1.

Keeping track

As things develop, I am gonna update this very posting, so feel free to bookmark or refer to the [perm link].


From: IBCL BLog.
Originally posted: 2008-10-07