KDE Developers' Centre

The K Desktop Environment

Table of Contents

• Tips for KDE programmers
  1. Loading and saving configuration settings
  2. Docking widgets onto the panel
  3. From Qt to KDE: it's easy!
  4. Displaying help with KDEHelp
  5. Multiple windows
  6. Dealing with network resources
• Programming guidelines
  1. Document your classes easily: use KDOC
  2. Class source documentation formatting rules
  3. User lower case filenames
  4. The class naming convention
  5. Don't hardcode paths
  6. Remember our commitment to network transparency
  7. Rid yourself of those "unused parameter" warnings
• Portability Tips
  1. Use config.h
  2. Avoid NULL
  3. On the scope of temporaries
  4. Don't initialize const in definitions
  5. Don't use arrays with runtime sizing
  6. Remove default args from method implementation
  7. Don't use gethostname() or getdomainname()
  8. Using ksize_t and socket.h
  9. No semicolon after Q_OBJECT
  10. Be careful while passing temporaries
• Contributed Qt Widget Dictionary
• Core and User Library reference
• Development tools
• KDE links
• Download these pages

Library reference

• Core library.

• KDE User Interface Library (kdeui)

• KFM client Library (kfm)

• Enhanced File Dialog (kfile)

• HTML Widget (khtmlw)

• Qt Library reference at Troll Tech. (Norway) and Melbourne, Australia.

• Linux Software Map (LSM) Entry Template

Useful development tools

• Use Qt Architect to design and edit Qt dialogs. This package used to be known as Dialog Editor or dlgedit.

• KDOC is the class documentation software used by the KDE team. Use it to generate HTML and TeX documentation direct from source.

• GNU Autoconf is the recommended package for ensuring application portability between different versions of UNIX. Most developers, however, will use kexample (from the kdesdk package) as a template so there is not too much to learn.

• PerlQt, an elegant and complete perl interface to Qt.

KDE-related Links

• Richard Moore maintains a useful developer documentation library in the UK.

• The KDE home page.

• KDE primary FTP site.

Download Documentation

• Download Developers' Centre as a tarred-gzipped file. (~15K)

• Download KDE library documentation in HTML format, as a tarred-gzipped file. (~250K)