<!-- Arrr, doubling my chances :) -->
<title>Configuring Toolbars</title> Nearly every KDE application has one or more toolbars at the top of the application window, underneath the menu. The toolbar contains icons (toolbar buttons) that represent commonly used actions and configuration settings. The KMail window, for instance, has a toolbar that contains buttons for "New Message," "Check Mail" and several others. Each of these actions is something you do often, so that is why they have toolbar buttons as well as menu entries (New Message is under Message->New Message, Check Mail is File->Check Mail). Not everybody agrees on what actions are commonly used, though, ( I never use the New Message toolbar button or the menu item, I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-N). To ensure that your screen isn't cluttered with things you don't need, each toolbar can be customized. Additionally, you can usually customize which toolbars are displayed and how, as well. <sect1><title>Customizing Toolbar Displays</title> The easiest thing to customize with the toolbars of any given application is whether they are displayed at all. Most applications have a Settings->Toolbars menu where you can select which toolbars are displayed and which are not. Konqueror has four toolbars, Main, Extra, Location and Bookmark. It can be convenient to turn off the Bookmark toolbar to save screen space. To do so, click on the Settings menu, choose Toolbars, and then uncheck the Bookmark Toolbar entry (do this just by clicking on the menu item). If there is no Settings menu, you can also right-click on the toolbar itself, and choose the Toolbars sub-menu from the resulting context menu. The same toolbar context menu, accessed by right-clicking on the toolbar, allows you to customize other properties of the toolbar: * Its orientation, so that instead of appearing at the top of the window under the menu bar you can place it on the left, right or bottom of the window. * Its orientation, so that the toolbar "floats" as a separate window which you can move independently. * Its orientation, so that the toolbar is squashed into a little flat grip that you can re-open by double-clicking on it (this is subtly different from making the toolbar vanish completely, since it it easier to cause it to re-appear). * The appearance of text alongside, underneath, or instead of the icons on the toolbar. * The size of the icons (if they are not supplanted by text). </sect1> <sect1> <title>Customizing the Icons on the Toolbar</title> The toolbar is intended for actions that you perform often, so what do you do if there is some useless icon there, like "cut"? Or what if you really want a "cut" button on the toolbar, but the application doesn't give you one? This is where the customize toolbars dialog comes in -- it give you complete control over the actions that are available on each toolbar. Choose Settings->Configure Toolbars from the application's menu, or Configure Toolbars from the context menu of the toolbar itself. This displays the configure toolbars dialog, which consists of a combobox <!-- drop-down box? --> with which you can select <emph>which</emph> toolbar to customize, and two lists of items -- one of the available actions, and one of the actions that are already in use on the toolbar. Often there are many many more actions available ( activate tab #12, for instance) than you would ever want on the toolbar, or even that you know exist in the application. The customize toolbar dialog can be a learning experience. You can drag actions from one list box to the other, rearrange the items on the toolbar <!-- in the list box on the right ..... not sure if I should be LTR-centric -->, or change the icon for a selected action. This allows you to drag the actions you don't want off of the toolbar and into the list of available actions; similarly, the actions you do want can be dragged into the toolbar. Clicking OK in the dialog immediately updates the toolbar with your new preferred actions. There are a few special items that can end up in the listbox for the current toolbar: * separators, which exist in two flavors, --- line separator --- and --- separator ---. These provide a little spacing and visual separation on the toolbar. * <Merge>, which is a special item that allows plugins and other loadable components of the application to insert their actions into the toolbar as well. It is generally not a good idea to remove this, since you cannot get it back. * ActionList:, these appear in various flavors (there is a viewmode_toolbar one in Konqueror) and again these represent lists of actions that might be inserted by plugins. Whenever you click on an action in the list of current actions, a description of it is shown in the dialog. This description will warn you if it is a bad idea to remove the action. If you do not like to drag things around, there are four buttons in the middle of the dialog which allow you to move the selected action from one list to the other, and to move a selected current action up or down in the list. There must be a way to restore the default toolbars in an application, in order to recover from accidentally deleting an important action like <Merge>, but I don't know what it is. -- KPilot - www.kpilot.org - HotSync Solutions for KDE
