This week in Usability & Productivity, part 46

This week in Usability & Productivity was full of bug squashing and user interface polishing! We landed a lot of nice fixes and improvements rather than focusing on big new features, and hopefully you’ll like them all!

Bugfixes

• In Discover, links in the descriptions for Add-On pages are now clickable (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover no longer complains that AppStream isn’t set up (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When there’s a Trash icon on the desktop, its context menu now displays the correct “Empty Trash” text (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The weather widget now correctly handles a temperature of zero degrees (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When using a Global Menu, the menu correctly empties itself when its window becomes minimized and inaccessible (Michail Vourlakos, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When manually removing files and folders from the trash, symlinks are now preserved instead of being silently deleted (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Fixed a bug that was preventing KIO from using a speed optimization when moving or copying fixes, which should improve performance (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• User interfaces that employ the Kirigami FormLayout, such as the Workspace and Mouse System Settings pages, are now always laid out correctly (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Breeze icons are no longer too light when used outside of KDE Plasma (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Middle-clicking on the breadcrumbs bar of an inactive split view in Dolphin now correctly opens the middle-clicked-on folder in a new tab (Thomas Surrel, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• The “Only show when using the application” feature for Places panel items now works in Dolphin (Elvis Angelaccio, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• When run on Wayland, Spectacle no longer frustratingly presents features that are not yet supported and don’t work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole no longer presents a non-functional option to remove “-Konsole” from the titlebar (Andrew Smith, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole’s “Vary the background for each tab” feature now works when the base background color is very dark or black (Andrew Smith, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

UI Polish & Improvement

• It’s now possible to close the Application Dashboard by clicking in the empty space in the search results view (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• The task manager’s window preview tooltips now better handle an enormous number of windows being open (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• In System Settings’ icon view, the background is now flat, instead of showing a gradient that was impossible for most screens to render properly (Jan Przybylak, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Dolphin, the move-to-trash/delete context menu item is now disabled rather than hidden when the selected item cannot be deleted (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• In Kate, the Comment feature is now smart enough to uncomment currently-commented code (Silas Lenz, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• In Kate, three more plugins are now enabled by default, including the popular and useful inline Terminal feature (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.