When Julius Casear said, as reported by Seutonius and Plutarch, Veni, Vidi, Vici, (I came, I saw, I conquered) he was, depending on your historical interpretation, either referring to the Roman victory at the Battle of Zela or giving a two-fingered salute to the Patrician Senate of Rome. Every schoolboy and girl who has had to endure the exquisite tortures of Latin will know that famous phrase.

Press the fast-forward button to the present and those words might not be out of place on the lips of the good people who developed Konqueror, the all-in-one browser and file manager, best described as a universal document viewer.

Depending only on kdebase it comes as a standard part of the KDE desktop and most GNU/Linux users have browsed or managed files with it at some point. Precisely because it comes pre-installed we tend to take it for granted; besides, in the intervening period since it was launched in 2000, many additions and alternatives have become available—notably the immensely popular Firefox.

Before I start a flame war between KDE and GNOME users and supporters of various file managers and browsers, just let me say that this is not a comparative exercise on their competing features. The purpose of this article is to acquaint the reader with features of Konqueror, of which, they may not be aware and to demonstrate that, with a few exceptions, it is possible to utilize and configure it in such a way that you can spend an entire session without leaving its confines. Of course, this can tend to make it look like a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, so if you need a particular tool GNU/Linux has an embarrassment of riches for the power user too. If many of these features are already known to you, hopefully the remainder will not be and you can use them to enhance your browsing experience. What follows is just my own personal selection of tips, tricks and features which I find most useful. Inevitably, you will have your own favourites (web search shortcuts, mouse gestures, remote files) and wonder why I left them out—so, sorry in advance.

Go smarter, go faster

Buried treasure is the most fun, so let’s get that spade out and start digging for a few Konqueror gems. One of the first, best and simplest things you can do is to get an easy speed boost. You can get Konqueror to load faster by tweaking the settings: click on Settings, then Configure Konqueror and scroll down to the last option, Performance. You can minimize memory usage and “preload” a specified number of instances of the browser. Experiment with these setting until you get a combination that best suits your needs and machine specifications in terms of memory and processor capacity. If you would rather not tinker with those settings and you are using Konqueror from within the GNOME desktop, a quick and dirty alternative is to fire up a small KDE application and minimize it. That way, launching Konqueror will require a little less heavy lifting.

You could also start Konqueror with a blank page by typing about:blank in an Alt + F2 KDE dialogue box or with about:konqueror—a default page which will allow you to choose where you go from there. (Later you will see how to incorporate these views into your Konqueror profiles.) If you want these start-up options on the Desktop, right click on an empty space there and select Create New and then Link to Location (URL) and in the prompt type a suitable name for the “profile” and, in the box directly below, type one of those commands.

A final way to open Konqueror quickly and just where you want it is to exploit the fact that the location label is actually draggable. Navigate to the web page you want and drag the favicon (to the left of the address) to the Desktop and select Link Here_and a Desktop shortcut will be created. Better still, if you wish to create a series of desktop web page shortcuts, select _Bookmarks and then choose Edit Bookmarks and drag the links you want onto the Desktops for as many bookmark icons you desire. Additionally, this method will not prompt you to copy or link to the desktop. It will install a Desktop icon automatically. The same applies to dragging to the panel.

Browse it, file it

One feature that makes Konqueror unique—and I do mean unique—is that while others web browsers have many excellent, and indeed unique features, especially Flock, Firefox and Opera, Konqueror stands alone by virtue of its ability to surf the web and navigate your computer file system from the same interface. Yes, I know, Firefox has an extension which allows you to split the screen and view two separate websites—but that is “websites” and not “a website and a personal file” as in figure 1.

Figure 1: Konqueror in browser and filemode

In this example, you effectively have a two-pane FTP client: just drag the FTP link in the right-hand browser screen to the file browser screen and Konqueror will prompt you to move/copy the ISO (figure 2).

Figure 2: Konqueror in “FTP mode”

If you have not set up a specific folder for such downloads you don’t need to spend time searching for it. (If you have KGet set up to intercept all download requests to bespoke folders this will override that setting.) If you prefer you can open a terminal within Konqueror and drag, drop and download a file there (see more of this below.)

To get this result, select Settings from the drop-down menu and choose Split Screen Vertically. However, for faster action with the keyboard simply do any of the following to open and close split screen configurations:

• Ctrl + Shift + L—splits the screen vertically
• Ctrl + Shift + T—splits the screen horizontally
• Ctrl + Shift + R—closes the active split screen(s)

Copying and or transferring files is made much easier by the use of split screens as it makes drag and drop even simpler. This includes external media too: CDs, DVDs, USB drives and USB sticks. You cannot make a catapult out of Konqueror—but you can utilize its “rubber band” method to select contiguous files and select from the right click menu for options. Just use your mouse to draw an area around the files you want (figure 3).

Figure 3: Selecting contiguous files with the “rubber band” method

If you need to to do some command-line work, Konqueror can save you the bother of opening up a separate console. If you select the Settings drop-down menu you will see an entry to “show terminal emulator” (or add the icon for it via the Settings drop-down menu, under Configure Toolbars and drag it onto the toolbar): this will open an instance of a terminal inside Konqueror. For a GNU/Linux newbie, this is a useful way to follow the system file structure—because clicking on a folder will not only take you to that item in graphical mode but it will be followed on the command line too. Once you have taken the shortcut to the desired directory you can execute commands on a particular file in the built-in terminal (figure 4).

Figure 4: Konqueror in file and terminal mode

Bespoke file management and browsing

Another great feature of Konqueror will save time and ease navigation: the View Filter.