Creative use of folderview

So I think I've got a funny story.

I was recompiling trunk to see how things are moving along, and I tend to live dangerously when I do this. More so than the average user, since I'm pretty familiar with the workings of the KDE build system, and what I can get away with.

When I rebuild KDE 4, I first delete my active installation -- while it's still running. The apps that were loaded at the time of deletion *usually* keep working long enough for me to finish my system recompile. I generally load firefox during this time as konq doesn't like to have the ioslaves deleted while it's running. :) I know, I'm just asking for trouble, and today I got some interesting trouble.

So, I was done surfing for a while in firefox, and I click the close button. Instead of closing, or rather, in addition to closing, it takes out KWin. Well, since I've actually deleted kwin from the filesystem in the meantime, it cannot recover from its crash. Not only that, but I now cannot switch windows in any way (since I have no running window manager), and kwin managed to make plasma the active window before dying, hiding my konsole window and so forth.

Well, after trying to use the Run dialog from the keyboard shortcut, and failing, I started to think of ways to recover from this, so I can continue to monitor irc, and my build process without nuking X and those KDE programs that are still able to run. Upon inspection of my plasma desktop, I see I have only one applet running: the folderview. That's very fortunate for me though. I unlock the widgets, go to the folderview properties. Fortunately this shows up *above* the plasma desktop, so I can use the properties widget. The downside is that I cannot use the keyboard to interact with it, only my mouse. Fortunately I can navigate to a custom directory using the mouse. I set it to "/usr/bin", and let the folderview redraw. There's tons of entries here, so I resize the thing to make finding stuff easier. I decide there's too many icons, so I set a filter on "twm". I then get my folderview with one icon, twm. I click it, and I get twm! sweet, now I don't have to restart X, and can change windows again through creative use of the plasma taskbar.

Well folks, there you have it. Best mis-use of the folderview applet of the day :)

Now that I don't have to worry about marketing anymore, I get to write more fun KDE blogs as a user, wheee!