KDE is still giving me pleasant surprises. Over the last week, I discovered three neat features in Konqueror.
First up, Konqueror supports the SFTP protocol. This means you can use Konqueror to browse remote file systems and transfer files to and from almost any host running sshd.
Type in a URL such as “sftp://yourhost.com”;, enter your password on the dialog box that appears, and – hey, presto! – you’re looking at the remote directory listing. From the directory listing, you can drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, click-to-view, right click, and all the usual stuff.
The second feature is the embedded Cervisia mode. Cervisia is KDE‘s light-weight CVS tool. To turn it on, bring up Konqueror on a CVS directory on your local file system, then press the toolbar button that looks like a red-brick wall.
Cervisia shows which files are checked into CVS, their revision, and whether they have been modified. You can also do diffs, browse the CVS logs, commit changes or update from the repository.
Cervisia works particularly well with a third feature, the Midnight Commander mode. To get there, open a new Konqueror window, then select “Settings > Load View Profile > Midnight Commander” from the menus.
Konqueror will reconfigure itself with three panes. Below the horizontal split is a terminal window, open to your home directory. Above the horizontal split, the window is split vertically to show two file listings. You can copy and paste files by dragging and dropping them between the panes. You can even drop them on the terminal window to paste in file names to commands.
If that’s not sweet enough, you can press F9 to open the navigation panel, giving you a tree structured view of the file system as well. This is much better than the Windows Explorer.
Konqueror has me well and truly hooked.
To be fair, Konqueror is not perfect: (a) it crashes maybe once a fortnight,1 (b) there are a few, rare incompatibilities2 – though bloglines is the only one I have found recently, and© it doesn’t run on Windows, so my kids can’t use it on game sites that rely upon IE plugins.3