Konsole starts in subdirectory of $HOME - eh?

[SteveRiley]

OK, here's a weird one. I rarely use Konsole via Kickoff or KRunner -- instead, I use Yakuake. On rare occasion I'll need more than one Konsole, so in such cases my route to that is via KRunner. Just now I did that, and noticed that it opens in a subdirectory of my home folder. Eh? I've never seen this one before. When I check the current profile, the initial directory is blank. When I click the icon next to the field, the highlighed item in the folder hierarchy is the directory my Konsole opens in.

Konsole must be reading this value from someplace, but where?

An answer to this question might also answer a related one: lately, Rekonq has always wanted to store downloads in this very same folder, despite the fact that my Rekonq configuration specifically indicates a different one.

Hmm...!

[rms]

Konsole must be reading this value from someplace, but where?

/home/"your user name"/.kde/share/apps/konsole/

Maybe this could be helpful.

[SteveRiley]

Thanks for the tip. Parent was configured as 'FALLBACK/'. I deleted the profile file, restarted X, and the problem persists. So apparently "FALLBACK" must have some kind of meaning.

As an experiment, I went to System Settings | Account Details | Paths and changed Documents path to something different. Guess what? Now, Konsole opens to that subdirectory. Furthermore, when instructed to Save as, Rekonq defaults to it as well. It appears that something has changed someplace, and is consulting whatever value KDE stores for Document path.

Curious, and worthy of some investigation.

[sumski]

Steve, i have similar or even the same thing. This happened for me (the Konsole part) every time i run Konsole from trunk, happened for 4.9, and for development cycles of earlier KDE versions. It always changes starting dir to ~/Documents. To be honest, i didn't investigate much, as i changed starting directory in Konsole profile and then it's OK.

[SteveRiley]

The problem occurs on my T520 running a straight-up Kubuntu install (with Xorg-Edgers, PulseAudio 2.0, newer kernel, stuff from your PPAs). But it does not occur on my X1, which is a base Ubuntu CLI with manually-installed KDE packages.

I have found it exceptionally convenient to have two similar laptops, with slight build variations, to suss out problems like these. I suspect some digging through various *rc files, comparing what's on the T520 to the X1, will reveal something.

[OneLine]

KDE 4.9 Konsole

Fixed: http://konsole.kde.org/changelog.php

KDE 4.9

Again there are a lot of changes in KDE 4.9, some of the new features and fixes are listed below.
...
- Konsole does not set initial working directory from cwd (187754)[ebcab3c]
...

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187754
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kd...76a5389ce52f3d

Use $PWD as the fallback value for setting initial working directory

This means running "konsole" literally in a terminal will open a konsole
which starts in the same directory as the current terminal. "konsole
--workdir ." is no more needed. This makes Konsole behave like most
other emulators.

Another befinit is it is now easier to use konsole for the "Open
terminal here" feature provided in file managers other than dolphin.
Note: due to the "single process" model of konsole, konsole sometimes
does not open the expected the direcotory when used by this "Open
terminal here" feature.

REVIEW: 104518
BUG: 187754
FIXED-IN: 4.9.0

More: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/104518/

Before applying this patch: the order of deciding the working directory is :

--workdir
profile option
$HOME

After applying this patch: the order of deciding the working directory is :
--workdir
profile option
$PWD of Konsole itself

The rational : ...

Fixing it back: KDE Menu editor -> Konsole

[SteveRiley]

Interesting, but curious... why would a three-year-old bug suddenly show up on one of my machines but not the other?