Dotan Cohen posted on Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:47:29 +0200 as excerpted:
> How does one remove entries from the Ksnapshot "Send to" feature? I only
> ever send to Kolourpaint, and I must have over 20 entries in there. That
> makes it difficult to find Kolourpaint, and the dialogue takes almost 4
> seconds to open.
>
> This is KDE 4.7 on Kubuntu. Thanks.
Based on the list I have here, with a similar number of entries and
taking a similar time...
There appear to be two classes of entries in ksnapshot's sendto menu:
1) Applications associated with images. (jpeg, png, etc, I didn't
investigate that far, but this set is the same list that appears in the
open with list for various images.)
Here, this list is relatively short, and based on the open-with behavior,
can't be what's delaying the menu, which is good, since this set is where
kolourpaint appears.
2) All the kipi-plugins based entries. kipi-plugins is normally an
optional package consisting of various image-targeted utilities, feature
enhancements, and integrated site-posting options. When installed, it
adds its set of options to several kde image-targeted apps, including
digikam, gwenview, IIRC krita, and, it would appear, ksnapshot.
This definitely adds a huge number of entries to the list, and is
probably what's taking the time to load, since the plugin design is
modular run-time linking to avoid build-time linking that would force a
hard dependency for any apps built against it. The tradeoff for making
it run-time optional, however, is that the whole list is scanned and
added at load-time.
Here, gwenview is about the only app I use kipi-plugins in. I don't have
digikam installed, only exceedingly rarely use ksnapshot, and while I
needed an image utility with alpha-channel handling and thus had krita
installed for awhile, I finally gave up on it as EXTREMELY unintuitive
and lacking the necessary documentation to work around that, in favor of
the gimp, which is both MUCH more intuitive (you read complaints about
it, but krita was MUCH worse for me, for sure) AND actually has quite a
bit of reasonably good documentation, as well.
Even in gwenview, tho, I generally only use one kipi-plugin, the OpenGL
image viewer plugin. All those export/upload to some-site options are
generally useless without an account on said site, and said account is
more or less useless unless you have a digital camera of some sort and/or
are an image-artist, generating your own content. I don't even have a
cellphone, the most common digital camera these days, and am not an image-
artist, so...
In gwenview, tho, while the initial kipi-plugin load takes some time when
it's first triggered by opening the plugins menu, gwenview apparently
caches the results, and subsequent usage of that menu is as real-time as
one normally expects of a menu.
Unfortunately, it appears ksnapshot doesn't implement this sort of
caching, as a second click of the sendto menu results in the same sort of
wait as the first one did! OUCH!
Anyway, take a look at the gwenview plugins menu, and any other places
you might use kipi-plugins in kde-based image apps, and see if you
actually use any of them. Since the kipi-plugins package is normally
optional (I've no idea what kubuntu does with it, tho) and because the
set is all "extra" functionality, you will very possibly find that you
don't use any of it, and can safely uninstall the entire package.
Meanwhile, here on Gentoo there's what's called install-mask. If I
really decided I didn't want the various individual plugins installed, I
could easily mask them, leaving only the one I actually use, the opengl
image viewer, to install. However, that wouldn't lessen the build-time
as the whole package would still be built, just parts of it wouldn't be
actually installed, due to the mask. If I wanted to avoid the build as
well, I could probably customize the ebuild to build just the plugins I
wanted, and the ebuild already makes some of them (generally the stuff
with other external dependencies) optional and I have many of those
already turned off, but customizing the ebuild sounds like more work than
simply letting the system over-build and just masking what's installed.
Hope it helps. I expect that if you do uninstall kipiplugins, you'll not
only lighten that menu quite a bit, but make it much faster as well,
since kde's normal sycoca (system config cache) infrastructure caches
file associations, etc, so populating the menu from that only should be
MUCH faster.
Alternatively, simply don't use the sendto menu. Instead, use either
copy, open kolourpaint and paste, or use save-as, and then either open
(if kolourpaint is your top app priority for that imagetype) or open-with
on the saved file and select kolourpaint. I think I've used both of
those options, but don't believe I've ever used the sendto menu (or if I
did it was before kipi-plugin integration), as I was both quite surprised
to s
