KGtk

The KGtk project is a LD_PRELOAD hack that enables certain Gtk applications to use KDE's file dialogs when running under KDE. The project overrides the Gtk file chooser functions to communicate with the KDE module/application. Once compiled and installed, users can run Gtk applications in two ways. Firstly, they can call /usr/local/bin/kgtk-wrapper gimp, or secondly, they can create a symlink from the wrapper script to the application. For example, ln -s /usr/local/bin/kgtk-wrapper /usr/local/bin/gimp. They also need to ensure that /usr/local/bin is before /usr/bin (or wherever the application is installed) in their $PATH. With this set up, running 'gimp' should successfully find the wrapper script first.

If everything works correctly, users can edit the .desktop file to have "Exec=/usr/local/bin/[appname]" instead of "Exec=[appname]". For instance, for gimp.desktop, it would be Exec=/usr/local/bin/gimp-remote-2.2 %U, or Exec=/usr/local/bin/kgtk-wrapper gimp-remote-2.2 %U. So far, the project has been tested with a few applications, such as Kino, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Streamtuner, AbiWord, Glade2, and Eclipse. However, some applications like AbiWord do not work, and Glade2 can crash when loading Kino's .glade file.

Nevertheless, the project works well for those who only use Kino, GIMP, and Firefox. As it is still a quick hack, it may not be stable under heavy usage, so users should not be surprised if it breaks. If it does, the Gtk apps will only fall back to using the standard Gtk dialogs. While the 'Portland' freedesktop project may undoubtedly find a better solution, users can still try the KGtk project out for themselves.