Allow one settings page to appear in multiple categories in systemsettings

Brainstorm
1

I found myself repeatedly trying to find “Mouse Cursor” under “Mouse”, “Sound Theme” under “Sound”, “Night Color” under “Display”, and stuck for a while. (They are all under “Appearance and Theme”)

And I searched for “Auto login” under “Autostarts” and “Session”. (It hides in a button in “Appearance - SDDM”)

Then I thought “Desktop effects” and “Lockscreen appearance” must be under “Appearance”. (They are under “Window management” and “Security and privacy”)

And why isn’t “Recent files” under “Security and privacy”?

Sure, I can see the logic behind the current setup. But how about we just put a settings page under every relevant categories? I don’t see any downside with that.

And we can even have more buttons that jumps from one page to another related page, just like those “More…” buttons in the home page. E.g. “Sound” can have a button to “Bluetooth”, as earphones are probably the most frequent usage of bluetooth.

2

i just use krunner to find settings.

click on the desktop and type night settings and it will take you right to the page… it doesn’t really matter what category the page is under.

if your idea were to be implemented and i were to use krunner to look for the setting page i would get multiple results and i would not know which one to choose.

3

No, the systemsettings krunner only looks for the name, description and keywords of kcm modules. It doesn’t look in categories. For example, try search for “security” or “privacy”, it won’t find modules under that category.

4

i meant that i use krunner to search for the actual setting, not the category.

“mouse” brings up 5 different settings for mouse things under the system settings category

5

No, it won’t. It searches for KCM modules (“pages”), not where they appear in the category. You can have as many links as you like to one web page, and it appears only once in a google search result. Just like that.

6

I guess that, if you use some often, you might as well create a desktop application that holds the ones you need.
Something like:

Screenshot_20231115_135541
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Running “systemsettings5 --list” in a terminal gets you a list. Create the desktop file accordingly with the action execs as exec=systemsettings5 kcm_whatever.

7

so what you are saying is even if a setting were to be available via many different categories, my krunner search would only show one of them?

when i follow the link, which category would it take me to?

wouldn’t there still have to be a main location that all the other links pointed to?

one would still have to be king.

8

Yeah, should have some kind of “canonical” category. E.g., if it’s a list of categories, then naturally the first one.

9

Not trying to derail the core point, but “Recent Files” definitely should be under “Security & Privacy”. It is for me:

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Auto-Login should be in the Session KCM and that’s eventually the goal. “Desktop Effects” will also eventually go away, with everything in it moved into the relevant places. All of this is more medium-to-long-term though. In the meantime it might be a sane idea to let KCMs live in multiple places at once.