Kddrescueview is a graphical viewer for GNU ddrescue mapfiles. It shows damaged and recovered disk areas on a colored grid. Kddrescueview provides a KPart for integration in other KDE applications.

Kddrescueview is just an exercise to improve my C++/Qt/KDE skills (see below the Development goal section). It is a blade copy of Martin Bittermann's excellent ddrescueview. Unless you need the KDE integration, you probably want to use ddrescueview which offers much more features.

This program is free software released under the GNU GPL version 2 or (at your option) version 3 or any later version accepted by the membership of KDE e.V.

I first had a look at Martin Bittermann's ddrescueview source code a few years ago. I had used ddrescueview to monitor the progress of disk recovery. Its internal is quite simple: it parses simple text files (GNU ddrescue mapfiles) and displays their contents on a colored grid which looks like the familiar defrag utility on Windows. ddrescueview is developed in Free Pascal with the Lazarus IDE. Although at the time I was learning Python programming and I was not interested in Pascal, it made ddrescueview a perfect choice for studying its source code. Pascal is a very clear programming language. It was also familiar to me as it is also the first programming language that I ever used when I was only 8. As an exercise, I wrote ddrescueview parser in Python, trying to make it the more Pythonic I could.

In 2018, I wanted to improve my skills in C++ and learn how to program with Qt. As a long time user of KDE, I was also interested in KPart technology. Back in 2000, KParts was what made KDE 2 stands appart. It allowed viewing PDF documents directly in the web browser, a feature that only Konqueror had at the time. Integration went further when most KDE 3 applications featured a KPart. It was possible to view a DVI file directly in the browser when browsing an FTP server. This made it difficult for new users who where not familiar with network transparency and application integration. The technology lost its traction with KDE 4. The tutorial to convert an existing application into KPart was not updated with the move to KDE Plasma 5.

Luckily, KDevelop 5 features an updated version of the KPart template. The development of Kddrescueview started from this template. I based the parser on the Python version, separating it even more from the Pascal code it drew inspiration from. Using a different widget framework, Qt instead of Lazarus, the source code is rather different although I tried to get the same graphical result.

So far the program is usable but a bit slow to refresh with a full screen window.

If you use KDE Neon Developer Edition, all tools and libraries are readily available in the base system. You may have to install library headers and compilers with other distributions. You can add argument '-G Ninja' to cmake and replace make by ninja for development (this is also the default build method if you build the project with Kdevelop).

cd kddrescueview
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PROJECTINSTALLDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..   <- do not forget the ..
make
make install or su -c 'make install'

where $PROJECTINSTALLDIR points to your installation prefix.

to uninstall the project:

make uninstall or su -c 'make uninstall'

Note: you can use another build path. Then cd in your build dir and:

export KDE_SRC=path_to_your_src
cmake $KDE_SRC -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PROJECTINSTALLDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

cd kddrescueview
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%PROJECTINSTALLDIR% -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..  <- do not forget the ..
[n]make
[n]make install

where %PROJECTINSTALLDIR% points to your installation prefix.

to uninstall the project:

[n]make uninstall

Note: use nmake if you're building with the Visual Studio compiler, or make if you're using the minGW compiler