Danimo's blog

Instead of individual replys to mails and other blogs, just a quick summary of answers to questions I received:

Q: You claimed QStyle::SH_LineEdit_PasswordCharacter didn't exist Qt 3, but it does!
A: Yes, I didn't really consider that to be honest. Mea cupla. Read this blog entry for an explaination.

Q: Can I add this to my style?
A: Sure you can, if you want users with older KDE versions to profit from it. Of course the nicer version would be to put it into KStyle and let everyone have it. But it's simple and cheap enough to add, maybe with a KDE-Version #ifdef once KDE 3.5.6 is released with that patch.

It seems like the authors of Serenity and Polyester are already hooked.

Q: Will this be in KDE 3.5.x?
A: Maybe. I will use a patched KDE for a while. If no problems occur, I will ask for inclusion for KDE 3.5.6. Of course Maxim, the current KStyle maintainer, has the last word about it. In general it's a fairly simple patch that adds less than 20 lines of fairly simple code. Also, the Kubuntu guys already added the patch to the kdelibs package of Feisty.

Update: I just committed the patch to SVN, so it will be part of KDE 3.5.6.

When I wrote my entry on password characters. I thought it was a Qt 4 only thing. I didn't even bother checking with Qt 3.3. Fortunately, Marco Martin, the author of Polyester asked me if he could use the code in his style. I checked QStyle in Qt 3 and indeed, QStyle::SH_LineEdit_PasswordCharacter is part of the QStyle API since Qt 3.2. My guess is that the Trolls introduced it in order to implement the XP- and/or OS X-styles.

That motivated me to patch KStyle, the base class for all KDE-styles, and look how pretty it is:


(click to enlarge)

PS: thanks go out to the folks who wrote Xephyr, a Xnest replacement capable of Xrender & friends. You guys made nested sessions on X a lot more bearable.

PPS: For all that keep asking: Yes, that means that with this patch, all KDE styles instantly show the new behaviour. Isn't KDE great?

I was wondering why KDE still uses asterisks for substition in password fields. Look at this example:



Well, in Qt 4 it's really easy to change it. This is the QPlastique style using Unicode character 0x25CF, a bullet point. If that one doesn't exiss in the current font it falls back to 0x2022, a slightly smaller bullet point. Only if the current font doesn't provide either (which is fairly rare according to my tests), it will fall back to an asterisk. This algorithme is actually stol^Wborrowed from the Windows XP style, so why does Plastique still use asterisks by default? The reason is probably that it was supposed to resemble the Plastik style from KDE 3, which had to use asterisks since the

QStyle::SH_LineEdit_PasswordCharacter

style hint was not part of the QStyle API. in Qt 4 this style hint allows for specifying any other unicode character:



You might wonder why I think that this change, started by Apple in OS X and Microsoft in Windows XP is a good idea: Well first the character looks odd enough so that people will understand that this character is really supposed to shadow the password input. I know from personal experience that using asterisks, which can actually be part of a password tend to confuse some people. And secondly... well, it looks a lot better. It's more centered in most fonts while asterisks are usually displayed upwards in the line edit.

(For the technically inclined, i have uploaded the sources for this small example, including a QPlastiqueStyle subclass that implements the change.)