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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Background starting from the console
From:       Magnus Ihse <d95-mih () nada ! kth ! se>
Date:       2000-07-02 18:59:29
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When running Windows, I often start Windows apps from command line,
like:
C:\>notepad autoexec.bat

which spawns off Notepad (or whatever app I started) in a separate
window, and immediately gives me a new prompt.

However, when I try the equivalent in KDE, I get something like:
miman:~>kedit foobar.txt
KCharset: Wrong Charset!!!

and no new prompt. If you know the technical details, this is
obvious, because what I should have done was something like
mimam:~>( kedit foobar.txt & )
to start the program in the background and spawn a new shell for the
output. 

This is not just confusing and illogical to people not used to Unix,
it is also annoying to those who are, and who try to integrate KDE
and classical console Unix, such as me. :)

After discussing with a friend the best way to solve this (like, is
this a KDE problem, or a shell problem? etc), we concluded that the
best way to solve this would probably be to let a newly started KDE
app fork to a new process which would run the real KDE application,
and the original process would just exit directly.

Since this behaviour is not optimal while developing programs, when
you would like to see the debug messages on stdout, it should
probably be possible to turn it off (and return to the current
behaviour) with a global setting.

I'm not sure if this would be hard or trivial to implement, but
that's not really the concern of this list. :) Instead I ask, what do
you think about this idea from a usability perspective?

/Magnus

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