Week 64 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative has arrived, and I think you’ll see why this week needed two posts. I’ve already published a guest post about the lock and login screen tweaks for Plasma 5.16, but we’ve got much, much more:
New Features
- Konsole can now do arbitrary grid-like splits (Tomaz Canabrava, Maciej Niedbdalski, and Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.08.0):
- Plasma Vaults can now be locked and unlocked directly from within Dolphin (Ivan Čukić, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Yakuake’s tabs and titlebar are now much more customizable (Lionel Chauvin, Yakuake 3.0.6)
- Spectacle now has a new -c command-line argument that will copy the screenshot to the clipboard instead of saving it to a file when using background mode (Karlo Dautović, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
- Dolphin now lets you add custom columns in Details View for video framerate and aspect ratio (Kochih Wu, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When dragging apps to the Application Dashboard’s favorites grid, the app now stays in the location that you drag it to (Tranter Madi, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
- The System Settings page for the SDDM login screen now correctly prompts you to apply or discard unsaved changes after changing the auto-login settings then then navigating away (Tigran Gabrielyan, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
- When using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, the KWin window manager now consumes less CPU time, and screen tearing should be substantially reduced too (Erik Kurzinger, KDE Plasma 5.12.9)
- Plasma Vaults are now sorted by name in the widget (Ivan Čukić, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The System Settings KRunner plugins page now gives focus to the search field by default (Jayesh Bhoot, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Wireguard support is now complete (Bruce Anderson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- When opened standalone, the Default Applications, Screen Locking, and Per-Activity Power Settings pages now have sensible default window sizes (Tigran Gabrielyan, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Thumbnail previews are no longer generated for files in encrypted vaults, which could be read when the vault was closed (Ivan Čukić, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework are now smarter about automatically inserting closing quotation marks (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Fixed a bug that could cause code folding to fold too much in Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework (Nibaldo González, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
- Fixed the root cause of the issue periodically causing error messages with the text “A folder named /home/user/.cache/kioexec/krun/6746_0/ already exists.” to appear (David Faure, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- The Baloo file indexing service no longer crashes when encountering .spx files that do not contain XML data as expected (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Spectacle’s “Quit after copy” feature now actually remembers the image in the clipboard (Karlo Dautović, KDE Applications 19.04.0 when run on KDE Plasma 5.15.4 or later)
- Dolphin’s settings window now prompts you to apply or discard unsaved changes when closing it (Amish Naidu, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
User Interface Improvements
- You can now show and hide the desktop with the Meta+D keyboard shortcut (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- When using double-click mode, single-clicking on a file in the save dialog now focuses the filename field so you can edit the name (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- The KDE save dialog now binds the return key to the “Save” Button even when the file list has focus (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- The KDE open/save dialogs now default to showing Detailed Tree View (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework now show a little lock icon on the corner for read-only documents (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
- Dolphin’s information panel now updates to show the hovered item when that item is in an inactive split view (Méven Car, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Dolphin tooltips that contain clickable URLs no longer extend to be excessively long; the URL is elided in the middle instead (Mikhail Krutov, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Now you have included the Nvidia fix, but missed the more important aspect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
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Screen tearing is fixed by this commit. See the comment at the bottom of the Test Plan in the review request.
https://phabricator.kde.org/D19867
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It’s the same diff that did both. I’ve updated the post to be clearer though, thanks.
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Astonishing!
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Incredible ! Tons of good stuff.
Oh, and this is the one work-around I thought would never came : “The KWin window manager now consumes less CPU time when when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver (Erik Kurzinger, KDE Plasma 5.12.9)”
Martin had good reasons not to add work-arounds to kwin ; but as it had affected so many users for so many years, the KDE team finally decided to. THANK YOU.
Without it, non-tech users would just think KDE sucks (CPU usage / tearing when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver ; not-so-smooth desktop when using work-arounds).
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typo : would never come
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Just to make sure : I do not criticize Martin’s former decisions, which are pretty sensible and well backed.
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Yeah, although I don’t think this has much to do with Martin’s decisions. In the end it’s taken attention from an NVIDIA engineer to improve the code pertaining to their hardware, which strikes me as exactly as it ought to be. It’s not the KWin maintainers’ job to also be an expert on the implementation details of all graphics hardware–especially those that use undebuggable closed-source proprietary drivers. I think the NVIDIA folks are doing the right thing here by recognizing that they alone have the domain expertise to fix these issues, and then fixing them.
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It’s superb that’s Konsole can now do arbitrary grid-like splits, but unfortunately sessions are not working yet.
However, I believe in you that you will get it done as well!! That’d be too awesome! 🙂
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I’m working on the sessions as we speak
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Translate for portuguese: https://opensuseopen.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/usabilidade-e-produtividade-do-kde-semana-64/
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>You can now show and hide the desktop with the Meta+D keyboard shortcut
So you’re going to copy all the windoze shortcuts to plasma?!
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Nah, just the good ones!
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next you’ll add meta+L for screen locking, ok
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Yep, lots of people have been asking for that, and it seems reasonable to me.
https://phabricator.kde.org/D20178
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Meta+D is a really good one. I’m a Mac and Linux user but from my brief time on Windows I’ve come to really miss Meta+D. Also Meta+E for the File manager.
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For those who migrated — maybe.
My setup:
meta+q(uit) for alt+F4
meta+w(indows operation menu) for alt+F3
meta+e(xpose) for ctrl+F9
meta+a(ll apps) for apps popup via minimal menu widget
meta+s(ettings) for system settings
meta+d(olphin) for file manager
meta+z for minimiZe a window
meta+x for maXimize a window
meta+c for minimize all windows or “show desktop”
It’s quiet autistic but logical and original at least.
And you can’t press meta+D with your little + middle fingers. I mean you can but it’s very inconvenient. At least on my XPS13. You know how hard is it to retrain yourself to use the new shortcuts instead of the old ones. I know I can redefine it, but what the hell. I always thought of KDE (Plasma) as of some kind of mixture of macos and windows on its original way, not a dumb copy of one of those. Nevermind.
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Great, the global shortcut of Meta + D is great for me, i had already configured on my Plasma as Global, it is just really useful to me.
Konsole looks pretty nice too, a shame that the new things will be for 19.08, but well. This means that in the near future we will have the possibility to divide the screen and using Konsole with multiple divide terminals at once?
Thank you as always to everyone who make all these amazing changes and new features, improvements, bug fixes, etc, possible.
Bests to all, Nate especially, as always ^^.
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Wow! Lots of cool stuff! Thank you guys
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Just wanted to tell that the drag and drop on the desktop issue is gone! Hopefully, it won’t re-appear like the last time. Probably some recent Qt updates made the change.
Finally, the Plasma desktop space is usable.
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should it be possible to update packages directly from the notification area without to open Discover?
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I proposed this but it turns out to be too technically problematic. We went in the opposite direction: the Updates Notifier just directly opens Discover now, without showing the Updates Notifier in an expanded state at all.
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“Konsole can now do arbitrary grid-like splits”… But will it show different shells in each split, like Terminator and Tilix do? Having to create tabs and manually manage them inside each split is very cumbersome. Splits and tabs should be equivalent UI representations for separate terminal instances.
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Yes the existing split feature already behaves that way. This new feature just adds flexibility to allow a Konsole window to have both vertical and horizontal splits, not just one type or the other.
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New great report
new spanish translation:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/04/01/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-12-de-2019/
Happy hacking!
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Thank you – nice chunk of updates!
I just have one tangential question – do you know what the font is being used in the last Kate editor screenshot?
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I don’t, sorry.
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