# The Base &kde; Applications

What follows is a brief description of a few of the base &kde; applications. For more information on any of the applications you should check the links recommended with each respective entry.

## Fundamentals

&konqueror;

- &kde;'s file manager, web browser, FTP client and much more. &konqueror; is the canvas for all the latest &kde; technology, from KIO slaves (which provide mechanisms for file access) to component embedding, allowing it to be a universal viewing application, capable of displaying various image files as well as documents.

  - Website: http://konqueror.org

  - View the handbook by typing `help:/konqueror` in &konqueror;'s Location Toolbar, or by selecting it in &khelpcenter;.

&kate;

- &kde;'s advanced multi-view text editor. &kate; is excellent for things such as viewing the &HTML; source of a webpage to handling advanced coding in C++, PHP and XML with its powerful syntax highlighting engine and code folding capabilities. &kate; is a very speedy application, being capable of opening huge text files in a matter of seconds, as well as allowing you to view a hefty amount of multiple views in order to see more instances of the same document and/or more documents at any particular time.

  - Website: http://kate.kde.org

  - &kate; Handbook

&konsole;

- The X terminal emulator for &kde;. &konsole;, like many &kde; applications, is extremely customizable; while you can create your own user sessions, you can also of course open &Linux; console sessions, shell sessions, as well as standard `root` and sudo sessions.

  - Website: http://konsole.kde.org

  - &konsole; Handbook

  - User Guide konsole-intro

&kicker;

- The &kde; Panel, used for handling your currently running applications, a pager allowing you to switch between desktops, quick launch buttons to act as application launchers and much more.

  - See panel-and-desktop for altering some of its settings.

  - &kicker; Handbook

kdcop

- A GUI front-end to the powerful &DCOP; (Desktop COmmunications Protocol). &DCOP; provides a comprehensive protocol for interprocess communication between &kde; applications. While this is increasingly useful to &kde; programmers, it is also beneficial to the ordinary user who would want to create a script, or, say, a SuperKaramba theme.

  - In the User Guide scripting-the-desktop and kdialog

  - Other Documentation: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/dcop.html

&kcontrol;

- The control center for the K Desktop Environment. You can alter a myriad of different things, ranging from themes, fonts and screensavers, to Internet, security and system administration.

  - See control-center.

  - &kcontrol; Handbook

&khelpcenter;

- The &kde; help system is used to provide access to the base &UNIX; help pages (man or info) as well as the native &kde; documentation provided by the &kde; documentation team or the application authors. You should be able to access all of the &kde; application handbooks from here.

  - &khelpcenter; Handbook

  - For information on the &kde; Documentation team, how to possibly join and help &kde;, see: http://kde.org/documentation

## Related Information

- http://kde-apps.org -- The largest directory of third-party &kde; applications.

- As you may have noticed, a wealth of information is accessible from the respective handbooks themselves, which can be accessed either by using the help KIO slave in &konqueror; (that is, type `help:/`application`` in the Location toolbar), or by selecting it in the &khelpcenter;.

- You can also likely find out quite a bit of information from the &kde; website, itself, at http://kde.org.

## Personal Information Management

&kde; PIM (Personal Information Manager) is a sub-project of &kde;, and it aims to provide an application suite to manage personal information. It has several components, but these can all be brought under one application -- &kontact;, which is the personal information manager. Below is an overview of a few of its popular components; that is, a few of the applications that integrate into it.

&kontact;

- This serves as the medium by which the rest of the applications in &kde; PIM can integrate with one another. All of the applications in &kde; PIM can be displayed inside here, and you can easily choose which ones to display. It also contains a Summary page by which you can get a brief overview of events and information in the other components.

  - Website: http://kontact.kde.org

  - View the handbook by typing `help:/kontact` in &konqueror;'s Location Toolbar, or by selecting it in &khelpcenter;.

&kmail;

- The mail component. &kmail; comes with full IMAP, POP3 and SMTP support. Signing and encrypting of emails is permitted, and there are many comprehensive anti-spam functions available. A spell check can easily be used, &HTML; emails can be viewed appropriately, and there is an advanced search feature.

  - Website: http://kmail.kde.org

  - &kmail; Handbook

&korganizer;

- A fully customizable organizer which constitutes as the calender component. &korganizer; provides management of events and tasks, alarm notification, web export, network transparent handling of data, group scheduling, import and export of calendar files, and much more.

  - Website: http://korganizer.kde.org

  - &korganizer; Handbook

&kaddressbook;

- The contacts component. &kaddressbook; enables you to manage your contacts efficiently and comfortably; contacts can be easily exported and imported from a plethora of different address book standards, and it can be efficiently integrated with &kopete;, &kde;'s multi-protocol instant messenger. Other features include support for all international character sets and advanced search functions.

  - Website: http://pim.kde.org/components/kaddressbook.php

  - &kaddressbook; Handbook

&knotes;

- A handy component which can serve to handle all your digital sticky notes. You can have them displayed on your desktop, they can be dragged n' dropped into emails, printed, or even be displayed after &kontact; is closed down.

  - Website: http://pim.kde.org/components/knotes.php

  - &knotes; Handbook

&knode;

- The newsreader component. It is GNSKA (The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval) compliant, has support for MIME and multiple servers.

  - Website: http://knode.sourceforge.net/

  - &knode; Handbook

&akregator;

- A lightweight and fast program to display news items provided by feeds, supporting all commonly used versions of RSS and Atom feeds. Useful features include searching in article titles, management of feeds in folders and setting archiving preferences.

  - Website: http://akregator.sourceforge.net

  - &akregator; Handbook

## Related Information

- See http://kontact.kde.org and http://kdepim.kde.org for more information.

- &kontact; Handbook

## Network

There are several network-related applications in &kde;. Below is a description of a few of these.

&kopete;

- A fully-featured and advanced IM (Instant Messaging) client, which has a number of protocols including MSN, Yahoo, and AIM. &kopete; can fetch display pictures, set aliases for particular persons, as well as run multiple IM sessions at any particular time. &kopete; is quite extensible, and has a comprehensive plugin system which comes with a searchable History of previous chats, statistics on a user's status, as well as a note system allowing you to create notes for each contact.

  - Website: http://kopete.kde.org

  - &kopete; Handbook

&kdict;

- A &GUI; front-end to the DICT protocol. It enables you to search through dictionary databases for a word or phrase, then displays suitable definitions.

  - &kdict; Handbook

  - The DICT Development Group: http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict.

&kget;

- A manager for your downloads which integrates with &konqueror;. &kget; allows you to group your downloads, pause and resume them, as well as several other things.

  - Website: http://kget.sourceforge.net

  - &kget; Handbook

## Related Information

- Several more &kde; network applications can be found in the &kde; Extragear; see extragear-network, under extragear-components.

## Office

This includes all applications in the &koffice; suite. See kde-office-components for a summary of the components.

## Graphics

&kde; has several graphics-related applications, ranging from PDF viewers to applications enabling you to take screenshots. Below is a delineation, as well as some related links, for a few of them.

KColorEdit

- A small and handy application for editing color palettes, as well as color choosing and naming. Colors can be chosen by giving the RGB hex code, by choosing the color from a myriad of different colors in the program, or even by grabbing the precise color of any particular thing on your screen.

  - KColorEdit Handbook

KPDF

- An advanced PDF viewer, based on xpdf, for &kde;. KPDF contains a number of ways to search through the document (standard find dialog, thumbnail filter, etc.) and has other features such as hands-free reading.

  - Website: http://kpdf.kde.org

  - KPDF Handbook

KView

- An image viewer program which supports a number of different image filetypes including JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF and many others. Kview has full integration with &kde; and it can be embedded into &konqueror; for viewing image files on your diskdrive as well as your FTP site or webserver, using its &URL; open support. Other features include a few image manipulations such as zoom, rotate, grayscale and flip.

  - Website: http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~ssk/kde/kview/

  - KView Handbook

&ksnapshot;

- An application for taking screenshots. It is capable of capturing images of the whole desktop, a single window, or a selected region. The images can then be saved in a variety of formats, including JPG and PNG.

  - Website: http://www.ipso-facto.demon.co.uk/ksnapshot/

  - &ksnapshot; Handbook

&kolourpaint;

- A simple and easy-to-use paint program, with features such as basic painting (drawing diagrams and finger painting), image manipulation and icon editing.

  - Website: http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net

  - &kolourpaint; Handbook

&kooka;

- An intuitive raster image scan program. &kooka; helps you to handle the most important scan parameters, find the correct image file format to save and manage your scanned images.

  - Website: http://kooka.kde.org

  - &kooka; Handbook

## Related Information

- Several more advanced &kde; graphics applications can be found in the &kde; Extragear; under the extragear-components, see extragear-graphics for a list of a few of them.

## Multimedia

A brief overview of a few of the multimedia-related applications below.

&juk;

- An easy-to-use music player for &kde;. &juk; is playlist and meta-data focused, allowing you to quickly search through the dynamic playlist provided. Some of the features include &CD; cover-art fetching from Google images, MusicBrainz integration for file identification over the Internet, and multiple audio backends, including &arts;, GStreamer and aKode.

  - Website: http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/juk.html

  - &juk; Handbook

&kmix;

- An application that allows you to change the volume of your sound card, and it supports several sound drivers. Each mixer device is represented by a volume slider, and you have basic options such as to mute that particular mixer device.

  - &kmix; Handbook

&noatun;

- A media player capable of playing WAV, Ogg Vorbis, as well as DivX encoded AVIs and other media formats. &noatun; features audio effects, a six-band graphic equalizer, a full plugin architecture, network transparency, and various look and feels.

  - Website: http://noatun.kde.org

  - &noatun; Handbook

## Related Information

- Several more advanced &kde; multimedia applications can be found in the &kde; Extragear; under the extragear-components, see extragear-multimedia for a list of a few of them.