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When I make changes in OpenStreetMap, I often need to extract the object colour from a picture or a video, as example for a building, bench or a roof. This collides with a feature in KDE which I really like: Dim Inactive Windows.

The setting is in the KDE settings, under Desktop Effects -> Dim Inactive. As the name implies, it dims (makes them a bit more dark) all non-active windows - which makes it visually clear which window is currently active. Quite useful.

For picking a colour from a picture/video I'm using KColorChooser, which provides the colour in Hex code - exactly what I need in OSM.

However when KColorChooser is the active window, and all other windows are dimmed, it extracts the wrong colour from the picture/video - the colour which is already dimmed. Not what I need. Therefore when I do OSM edits, I temporarily disable this feature.

At first I went into the KDE settings, twice, but this is too many clicks. Then I figured out the commandline arguments to disable and enable this feature.

Disable "Dim Inactive":

kwriteconfig5 --file kwinrc --group Plugins --key diminactiveEnabled false
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

Enable "Dim Inactive":

kwriteconfig5 --file kwinrc --group Plugins --key diminactiveEnabled false
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure

Now all I need to do is execute a small script which is in my personal ~/bin directory. Let the edits continue.

Note: I wish JOSM would have an integrated video player which also allows to pick colours. But so far I haven't found any such plugin.

I'm a (more or less) happy KDE user, ever since the KDE 3 days. Before that, I used fvwm2 for a long time, but that is a different story. It also happens that I never really reinstalled my home directory - the oldest files I can find are from 1997, and that is pretty much when I switched from an old Slackware system with self-compiled updates, to something with a more modern distribution. That means, that all the time from 1997 to today, I carry the same /home/ads across my computers. The home directory grew from a few MB to 133 GB today (maybe I should clean it up, but then again it's cheaper to buy a bigger harddisk).

It also means, that I never deleted my KDE config, even when upgrading to KDE 4 or Plasma.

In the meanwhile (KDE 4.3) the software was improved and with some manipulations konsole can be forced to start with a fixed size.

Sometimes i use the "Run command" functionality in KDE (Alt+F2) to start a program - that's faster than clicking all the way through the menu until i found the entry and given the fact that the dialog is saving a history i usually only type one or two characters and have the full command line available. But the command history grows by and by - and sometimes i want to remove old and no longer used entries (like gaim which is pidgin now). That's not possible *ouch* at least not in the "Run command" dialog or in the preferences. The Mozilla/Firefox-way (shift+del) also does not work.

Time to descend into the personal .kde directory and dig in some config files ...

The file in question is: ~/.kde/share/config/kdesktoprc and if you open the file in your favoured editor you can see (among others) a section named "MiniCli". Remove the no longer needed items from CompletionItems and History and save the file - but take care that KDE is not changing the file in the meantime. My own background changer (which set's a new background every minute) is such a candicate - so KDE is updating this file and your saving would overwrite the file.

The changes take effect after the next login.