Windows/windows specific features
Over the years, some windows specific features have been developed and are shipped with KDE applications.
This commandline application is in the kde-runtime package and generates a start menu from the .desktop files that are used for that on Linux. Please refer to the output of kwinstartmenu --help for help now.
kde.conf
The first version of this feature has been added to 4.8.0 release, an extended version has been added to 4.10.2 release. This is not yet upstream, but will be integrated into every release from now. Since it should be possible to have several KDE installations side by side without messing around with another installation's settings, the path of the user writeable settings directories .kde, .local and .config need to be moveable. This is done by some patches to kdelibs and akonadi that look for a file kde.conf in the directory %KDEROOT%\bin. This file can contain values for the environment variables KDEHOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_DATA_DIRS, XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS. The environment variables will still override the settings made in the kde.conf file. If you are a packager of a KDE on Windows application it is recommended that upon installation you write such a file to move your default settings into your directory: e.g. a digikam installer would move all settings to %APPDATA%\.digikam .
An example kde.conf file which moves everything below %APPDATA%\.kde-stable:
[KDE]
KDEHOME=%APPDATA%\.kde-stable
[XDG]
XDG_DATA_HOME=%APPDATA%\.kde-stable\.local\share
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=%APPDATA%\.kde-stable\.config
There are two COM based context menus available for the windows explorer, one general in the kde-runtime package and one in the kate-contextmenu package specifically for kate.
- The general context menu will open the files selected in the default KDE application for that mime type, e.g. it will do the same action dolphin would do if you simply open those files from there.