On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 03:02 PM, Ed Skinner wrote:
> For Kurt Granroth:
>      Cool, I didn't know Konqueror was that smart. The interface is
> immeasurably better than info's which I can never remember, anyway. 
> I've
> hereby been converted from "info" to "konqueror".
>      My sincere thanks for the tip!

Glad to help!

Very technically speaking, it's not Konqueror that does the real work.  
KDE has
a "plugin-like" infrastructure called "IO Slaves" that are active 
throughout KDE.
For instance, there is an io-slave for http and one for ftp and for 
imap and quite
a few others.  Once you drop such a slave into the mix, every KDE app 
will
automatically have support for that protocol.  So if you are writing a 
KDE app and
you want to download a file using, say, http, you simply have to pass 
an http URL
to the io-slave infrastructure and it will take care of all the real 
work.

In addition to the big protocol slaves, there are also some "local" 
ones like man,
info, and audiocd.  That latter one is seriously cool.. check out 
http://dot.kde.org/984441100/
for more details.

One of the nice thing about the support being in the KDE infrastructure 
is that ANY
place where you can enter a URL can handle those protocol.  I very 
rarely start up
konqueror by hand anymore.  I just use the "Mini CLI" accessible via 
Alt+F2 and enter
the URL directly.

So say I want a man page for 'ls'.  Instead of opening up a terminal 
and typing 'man ls'
and getting a plain text non-hyperlinked page, I just do Alt+F2 then 
'man:ls' and I get
a konqueror window with a html version (with hyperlinks) of the 'ls' 
manpage.

I could go on and on (for fun, try Alt+F2 then type 'gg:some search 
term') but I've
blathered on enough already :-)