Aargh! - Why does krunner keep disappearing??

[David C. Rankin]

Guys,

When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.
--
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: [phone]
Facsimile: [phone]
www.rankinlawfirm.com

[Pit Suetterlin]

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Hmm, things are working here (also the taskbar-icon-select thing) -
but I had problems with the latter before, too. Did an update
yestarday and a reboot, too - maybe something's fixed already?

Pit

[Tejas Guruswamy]

Post by Pit Suetterlin

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Hmm, things are working here (also the taskbar-icon-select thing) -
but I had problems with the latter before, too. Did an update
yestarday and a reboot, too - maybe something's fixed already?
Pit

I'm afraid krunner in 4.4.0 hasn't been as reliable as it should be for
me either ... every so often I have to "kquitapp krunner &&
kdeinit4_wrapper krunner" to get it back to full responsiveness.

aseigo's done some work that might help that should have made it into
4.4.1 (haven't checked, but it should be released very soon, KKFD
already has it but isn't published):
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/02/krunner-responsiveness.html

Regards,
Tejas

[Will Stephenson]

Post by David C. Rankin
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type
in the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use
it more than the menu and now you --- can't.

I guess that it's crashing. KRunner uses multiple 'Runners' running in their
own threads. If you click the wrench icon at the left side of the KRunner
popup, you can disable individual runners. Could you try to disable
individual runners (binary search?) to determine which one is dying?

You can also restart krunner in gdb in a shell to get a backtrace of the
crashing runner with

killall krunner && gdb --args krunner --nocrashhandler --nofork
then 'run', then when it dies 'bt', copy that, finally 'quit' to get out of
gdb, killing the dead and suspended krunner process.

Will

[Patrick Shanahan]

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Krunner works fine as long as you deselect everything except having krunner load
programs and run scripts.
I was amazed when I clicked preferences in krunner in kde44 and saw that krunner
was filtering the input against all email address, bookmarks, dictionaries, wiki
pages, the qt4 manual, walking the neighbors dog, etc..... One of those
"features" is broken causing krunner to crash when you get to the 3rd or 4th
character. Deselecting everything has restored krunners usefulness.

Don't know why you would be amazed. Didn't you remark that you killed
akonadi* and .... ?

krunner would need that to search thru your contacts

A shotgun might be more effective :^)

[John Andersen]

Post by Patrick Shanahan

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Krunner works fine as long as you deselect everything except having krunner load
programs and run scripts.
I was amazed when I clicked preferences in krunner in kde44 and saw that krunner
was filtering the input against all email address, bookmarks, dictionaries, wiki
pages, the qt4 manual, walking the neighbors dog, etc..... One of those
"features" is broken causing krunner to crash when you get to the 3rd or 4th
character. Deselecting everything has restored krunners usefulness.

Don't know why you would be amazed. Didn't you remark that you killed
akonadi* and .... ?
krunner would need that to search thru your contacts
A shotgun might be more effective :^)

Why would krunner (who's main job is to prevent you having to launch a
shell simply to launch a program) need to search thru contacts or thru
akonadi?

This is feature creep run amok.

[John Andersen]

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Krunner works fine as long as you deselect everything except having krunner load
programs and run scripts.
I was amazed when I clicked preferences in krunner in kde44 and saw that krunner
was filtering the input against all email address, bookmarks, dictionaries, wiki
pages, the qt4 manual, walking the neighbors dog, etc..... One of those
"features" is broken causing krunner to crash when you get to the 3rd or 4th
character. Deselecting everything has restored krunners usefulness.

Wow!
I had no idea that thing bloated up to do all those unwanted (and unadvertised)
things. No wonder it is dog slow. I unchecked everything and its much better.

[Tejas Guruswamy]

Post by John Andersen

Post by David C. Rankin
Guys,
When I try Alt+F2 in kde44, krunner appears for a second, but when I type in
the second or third char, krunner disappears. Anybody got a fix? I use it more
than the menu and now you --- can't.

Krunner works fine as long as you deselect everything except having krunner load
programs and run scripts.
I was amazed when I clicked preferences in krunner in kde44 and saw that krunner
was filtering the input against all email address, bookmarks, dictionaries, wiki
pages, the qt4 manual, walking the neighbors dog, etc..... One of those
"features" is broken causing krunner to crash when you get to the 3rd or 4th
character. Deselecting everything has restored krunners usefulness.

Wow!
I had no idea that thing bloated up to do all those unwanted (and unadvertised)
things. No wonder it is dog slow. I unchecked everything and its much better.

This has come up before, have a look at my post on the -kde list

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2010-03/msg00031.html

I found the "Control Audio player" and "Windows" runners are buggy and
cause random freezes. Disable them for sure.
Also, all the web-lookup runners are slow for obvious reasons and so
disabling them is a good idea too.
Because I have strigi turned off I disabled the nepomuk runner.
And the "Contacts" runner doesn't appear to work with Akonadi so that
can go off too.
And the "Terminate Applications" doesn't work. With these off my krunner
is nice and fast, no problems.

Krunner supporting plugins is great, but maybe which ones are on by
default should be thought about more carefully ...

Regards,
Tejas

[John Andersen]

Post by Tejas Guruswamy
This has come up before, have a look at my post on the -kde list
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2010-03/msg00031.html
I found the "Control Audio player" and "Windows" runners are buggy and
cause random freezes. Disable them for sure.
Also, all the web-lookup runners are slow for obvious reasons and so
disabling them is a good idea too.
Because I have strigi turned off I disabled the nepomuk runner.
And the "Contacts" runner doesn't appear to work with Akonadi so that
can go off too.
And the "Terminate Applications" doesn't work. With these off my krunner
is nice and fast, no problems.
Krunner supporting plugins is great, but maybe which ones are on by
default should be thought about more carefully ...
Regards,
Tejas

This seems to have morphed into a substitution for a REAL search facility.

What would be wrong with a REAL search facility?

The swiss army knife approach to basic system utilities is not really helpful
in my opinion. It obfuscates functionality. Plugins for plugins sake don't
impress me much.

Wasn't this at least part of the reason Kong got gutted and replaced with
Dolphin internals? T

[Tejas Guruswamy]

Post by John Andersen

Post by Tejas Guruswamy
Krunner supporting plugins is great, but maybe which ones are on by
default should be thought about more carefully ...

This seems to have morphed into a substitution for a REAL search facility.
What would be wrong with a REAL search facility?

Eh? If by "REAL search" you mean file name search, kfind works as well
as always ... all the krunner stuff is in addition, don't know what you
feel you are missing ...
And you can even have superfast file name search integrated into
krunner, if you have nepomuk/strigi on.

And the bits of krunner that do work (and most of it does work, just a
few broken runners spoiling the party) are incredibly useful, bordering
on indispensable.

Post by John Andersen
The swiss army knife approach to basic system utilities is not really helpful
in my opinion. It obfuscates functionality. Plugins for plugins sake don't
impress me much.
Wasn't this at least part of the reason Kong got gutted and replaced with
Dolphin internals? T

There was a strong argument that it was better to have a separate file
manager and browser, so that each application could focus on a task
properly. Not sure what you're trying to link that to plugins for? But
anyway, best not to prolong that discussion topic.

Regards,
Tejas