kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Patrick Maupin <pmaupin@...>]

This is one of those things that is not that big of a deal once you
understand what is happening, but it gives a very bad out-of-the-box
feel to a newish user.

I use Kicad (current subversion rev 2005) on Ubuntu Jaunty with KDE
4.3, and the KiCad dialog boxes do not appear in the KDE system
taskbar. If I leave KiCad running when I log off, then KDE faithfully
restores KiCad (and eeschema and presumably all the other programs)
when I log back in.

The problem is that, after I log in, I see the KiCad program on the
task bar, I click on it, and I try to manipulate KiCad, but it seems
dead to the world. In reality, it is not dead, but I need to use
alt-tab or some other method to locate its dialog box which is
informing me that it has deleted a stale lock file, and click OK on
that for the main KiCad window to come back to life.

Before I figured this out, my modus operandi was to use ps and grep to
locate the KiCad processes and kill them if I inadvertently didn't
close KiCad before logging out.

So, if it is not too difficult, it would be great if a modal dialog
box like the stale lock notification is placed on top and given the
focus whenever I attempt to interact with the main program window.

(Of course, another nicety would be to handle the logout notification
and delete the lock file before exiting, so that users who keep KiCad
up all the time do not receive a complaint on every single login.)

Best regards,
Pat Maupin