Part of the dramatic switch to a full KDE desktop included getting back into working with Konqueror, KDE’s internal browser. Now, I had gotten mighty addicted to FireFox, Mozilla’s browser, over the last few months. I was pretty much planning on just using Firefox for all my work, rather than Konqueror.
But, dammit, Konqueror keeps doing Really Cool Stuff. There’s this basic concept of a KIO-Slave, which is a small plugin handler that attaches to Konqueror There are zillions of these suckers that let you browse anything just like it’s a filesystem. The niftiest of these so far is ‘kio-fish’.
In the location bar in Konqueror, I can simply type ‘fish://mylogin@somehost.com/home/mydir’ – and it’ll ssh login me into that machine, and show me the files there, in a normal browse window. I can copy, move, delete, drag and drop to that dir, anything I can do locally. I recently updated a few pictures from my laptop (jboat) to our server (lightship) simply by doing Alt-F2, fish://shevett@lightship/, getting that dir, and dragging the file from my home dir on the laptop into that window. Zing!
Oh, right, that Alt-f2 thing. Since Konqueror is totally embedded, I can hit alt-f2 anywhere, and type a url, a kio-slave driven location, or an executable name, and off she goes.
But, I wasn’t ready to switch browsers! Again.
Decisions decisions decisions.
