This week in Usability & Productivity, our flagship Kate text editor got a lot of love–and there’s more in the pipeline too! But that’s not all…
New Features
- Bluetooth devices now show their battery status in the power plasmoid (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
- The Notes widget now has a “Transparent with light text” theme (KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
- The Baloo file indexer is now able to extract and display cover art for .asf, .wav, .aiff, .ape, .wavpack and .speex files (Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- Kate’s File menu and tab context menu now feature a bunch of useful new actions: Rename, Delete, Open Containing Folder, Copy File Path, Compare [with another open file], and Properties (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When scrolling through lists of Plasma addons in Discover, images are now properly cached so they don’t reload when you scroll backwards (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0
- The names of color schemes are now translatable, and should be translated soon (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- Much more metadata from image EXIF data is now visible in Dolphin, Gwenview, Baloo, etc. (Alexanter Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- Made some progress on the Samba share discovery issue: when using a modern version of the SMB protocol, now Samba shares for Mac and Linux machines can be discovered (Harald Sitter, KDE Applicstions 19.04.0)
- Konsole now does a better job of rendering box and line characters (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Improved the user interface and layout for the Digital Clock’s settings window, which fixes various bugs (Marco Martin and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
- The wallpaper chooser interface now looks good when using a fractional scale factor and no longer cuts off the text of the “Get New Plugins…” button (Marco Martin, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- In the Devices Notifier plasmoid, devices’ eject icons are now better aligned (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
- When you try to copy a file greater than 4GB in size to a FAT-32 formatted disk (which cannot support files of that size), an appropriate error message is now displayed (Shubham, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- The Baloo file indexer now indexes metadata in SVG images (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- When using Kate’s Build View plugin, there is now better error handling when the build directory cannot be created (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
- Improved the user interface for Kate’s Code Analysis 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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Amazing! Easy rename in Kate and Bluetooth Battery are my favorite additions of this week!
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great work
espcially on Discover
i hope u guys keep pushing improvement in Discover
because discover realy need this
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https://cgit.kde.org/discover.git/commit/?id=63d8dc77118557f81f79c94fdbe21c4cc6e4a368
>qDebug() << "wooooooooo" << cacheDir;
Is it supposed to be there? 😛
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Nice new “Next week …” Paragraph 🙂
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Nice to see all the features coming in.
Baloo: the tool that used to outright hang and peg a cpu, which became the tool that competes for full-rate disk io (when it isn’t hung), which became the tool that I now find and disable the first moment when KDE comes alive on a system.
I see it’s gaining the abiliy to parse unpopular rarely used audio formats that have long been replaced or are deprecated with better alternatives. So baloo is likely adding corner case features that will be rarely used, however likely this parsing won’t be bugfree so baloo is getting more bloated and finding new ways to inspect and choke on file content. All the more reason to disable such a diseased beast!
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If you don’t understand what you are talking about, you better keep your mouth shut …
Unpopular audio formats – just because you don’t use it, nobody else should use it? What makes your choice more relevant than other persons choices? Why should everyone convert their existing files to a different format?
Metadata extraction is *not* done by baloo, but by KFileMetaData, so no a single line of code added to baloo. KFileMetaData is used by baloo, but also by Dolphin to show information in the side bar. Although storing the metadata avoids extracting the metadata again and again and makes it searchable.
Nobody forces you to use baloo. If you don’t like it, most likely because of bad past experience, switch it of. I have hundreds and thousands of eBooks, music files, PDF data sheets and more indexed by it, and its working fine for me.
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This is my experience too. I have zillions of files that are all indexed and finding what I’m looking searching by content works great. Nothing’s perfect, but the bugs are being worked on.
BTW everyone, lurchi is one of the people who’s working tirelessly to improve Baloo. He’s doing an amazing job and deserves a round of applause if you ask me!
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Thank you and all the other contributors very much for the hard work on Baloo! Baloo is for me one of the most important Plasma components enabling me to find extremely fast my documents, something like a local Google search engine. 🙂
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wow, amazing new features! great KDE team!
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> Bluetooth devices now show their battery status in the power plasmoid
Terrific, just terrific. Amazing job everyone! I hope you all remember to take breaks and vacations do you don’t burnout!
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I like the new improvement of Kate. You can do file operation directly in Kate. It still miss one feature: create file in a folder of project view. This feature has been implemented by all kinds of IDE and some editors like VS Code. Web developers would love it because they create a lot of new files.
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The Samba feature is one of the greatest improvement to me – can’t wait til 19.04!
Hopefully you guys also find a solution to discover Windows shares. 🙂
Keep going!
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Thanks, I hope so too!
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Thanks for the work you are doing on Plasma 5 which is my favorite DE. I would have a curiosity … why the terminal-Konsole by default is not set on the theme Breeze? It’s a question I’ve always asked myself and it’s one of the changes I usually do.
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A good question. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391920. I’ll submit a patch this weekend.
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Fixed now! 🙂
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Perfect !
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