Seeing GTK mouse cursor in KDE?

If you have upgraded to Kubuntu 12.10, you’d notice that KDM has been replaced with LightDM.  LightDM looks pretty, but somehow doesn’t play well with KDE.  One annoying issue I have noticed is that GTK applications run in KDE use GTK mouse cursor under certain circumstances.  When Chrome shows a menu, the mouse cursor changes to a GTK one and it looks jarring.  Turns out, there’s a fix for that.

1. Install LightDM KDE greeter

sudo apt-get install lightdm-kde-greeter

2. Make LightDM use KDE greeter, and all will be well again. To do that, edit the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and change the value of greeter-session.  The file will look something like this after the change.  (Boldface text is the change you’d have to make.)

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=lightdm-kde-greeter
user-session=ubuntu

3. Save the file and test your changes by running LightDM in test mode:

lightdm --test-mode

If LightDM doesn’t open correctly, check if you have made any typing errors in the config file.  If you cannot fix the issue, just restore the file as it was before you edited; you’ll still have the ugly mouse cursor issue, but at least your computer will continue to work.

Prettier fonts in KDE

If you’re a KDE user and have always envied Gnome for its font rendering (especially with fonts like Ubuntu and Ubuntu Mono), read on.

All you need to do is select ‘Enabled’ for System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts > Use anti-aliasing.  Click on the Configure button and set Hinting style to ‘Slight’.  If you like ClearType style font rendering, enable subpixel rendering too.

Any program that’s opened after this change will use the new font rendering settings.  So you may want to restart your open apps or logout and log back in.

Directly switch to the window that’s showing a popup

If a window that’s not currently active shows a dialogue box, KDE would highlight it in the taskbar.  Switching to that window is a lot easier than hunting it down by pressing Alt+Tab repeatedly.  Just press Ctrl+Alt+A, and voila, you’re looking at the window that’s asking for your attention.

Auto-deleting files from Trash and trash-cli package

Two tips about using Trash (aka Recycle Bin) folder efficiently on KDE:

1. You can configure Dolphin to automatically delete files from Trash that are older than a certain number of days.  Use Dolphin menu > Configure Dolphin... > Trash > Delete files older than setting.
2. You can access your Trash from command line if you have trash-cli package installed.  (Install it by running sudo apt-get install trash-cli command.)  Once installed, trash-list command shows the contents of your Trash, trash-put command moves files to Trash, and trash-empty command permanently deletes everything in Trash.

Source: A comment on Stefaan Lippens’ webface.