This week in KDE: Accent colors!

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

New Features

System Settings’ Colors page now lets you optionally choose an “accent color” that’s different from the one shipped in your color scheme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin no longer crashes on quit when the embedded terminal panel is open (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 21.08.1)

Elisa’s Files view now works again (Bart De Vries, Elisa 21.08.1)

Elisa’s in-app “next track” and “previous track” shortcuts (Ctrl+right/left arrow) are now listed correctly in the settings window (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.08.1)

You can once again rename items from Dolphin’s Folders panel context menu (Jan Paul Batrina, Dolphin 21.08.1)

Spectacle’s “Automatically copy to clipboard after taking screenshot” feature now works properly in the Plasma Wayland session (Méven Car, Spectacle 21.08.1)

Spectacle’s “Open Containing Folder” action now opens the correct location after the screenshot has been copied to the clipboard rather than manually or automatically saved anywhere (Jan Paul Batrina, Spectacle 21.12)

Dolphin no longer unnecessarily opens a new window after compressing or extracting files in Ark using the context menu action (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 21.08.1)

Dolphin’s “Reset Zoom Level” action now works when file previews are disabled (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.08.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, users of version 470 and beyond of the proprietary NVIDIA drivers will no longer suffer from XWayland app windows displaying vertically mirrored or blacked-out content (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.4)

System Monitor no longer sometimes crashes when viewing the Processes page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.23)

Plasma no longer hangs when accessing the clipboard applet or popup menu if any of the entries are extremely long (Someone going by the pseudonym “ValdikSS”, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager now shows feedback on app icons when you click on them to launch apps, just like it does on in the X11 session! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23)

The System Settings Night Color page no longer begins geolocating using a 3rd-party service immediately upon opening, and instead only does it when needed (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23)

The screen locker background is no longer sometimes misaligned in multi-screen setups (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

Multi-screen layouts are now retained across X11 and Wayland sessions (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

System Monitor now remembers which page you were last on when re-opened as a part of session restoration (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

Discover is now a bit faster to launch and load its initial view (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

System Monitor now reports CPU information correctly on FreeBSD systems (Adriaan de Groot, Plasma 5.23)

Fixed two substantial memory leaks that could affect Plasma and Plasma widgets (Matt Whitlock, Frameworks 5.86)

When using an app with a hamburger menu on its toolbar that is provided by the KHamburgerMenu control, a duplicate copy of the menu structure no longer also appears in the context menu when you are using a Global Menu applet too (gosh, so many ways to display menus) (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 5.86)

User Interface Improvements

The playback and volume sliders in Elisa now correctly react to your color scheme (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.12)

The buttons in Elisa’s Playlist have been re-arranged so that there is room to show labels for them when space is available, and they are now responsive: when there isn’t space for labels, they become icons-only buttons again (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.12):

The icons in KolourPaint’s “Rotate” dialog now look good and follow the icon theme (Kai Uwe Broulik, KolourPaint 21.12)

The System Settings Night Color page now tells you when you’re about to undertake an action that will perform geolocation using a 3rd-party service (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23):

In System Settings’ Feedback page, you can now see a historical record of what data (if anything) has been sent to KDE (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

When rotating the screen in the Plasma Wayland session–either manually or automatically according to the device’s orientation sensor–there is now an animated transition between the old and new rotations (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

The “clear text” button inside text fields throughout Plasma and QtQuick apps is now the same size that it is in QtWidgets apps (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.86)

Various bookmark-themed Breeze icons are now visually differentiated from one another (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.86)

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Published by Nate

Published

28 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Accent colors!”

  1. Amazing !! Color accent, I was praying for it when I was on KDE3 already ^_^

    By the way, asa small project for me to learn Python, I did a little script that re-creates the folder icons using the different coloured folders from the breeze theme. (So basically, it re-creates all the documents, home, video, images, … folders icons, but with red, yellow, green, … colors)
    If there is an interest, I’ll be happy to share it / improve it. That would look great to have folders corresponding to the accent color.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. Yes, that’s what the script does, it’s a one shot and creates all the icons at once.
      But I didn’t know about breeze Rainbow, and that’s basically what my script generates

      Like

    4. Ichecked Breeze Rainbow, it’s amazing, I don’t understand how that can even work, how are the svgs getting the color?
      Any clue of why it’s not pushed to master?

      Like

    5. SVGs can have embedded CSS stylesheets, and ours do. There is code in our icon loading functions that can substitute CSS stylesheet colors for known color scheme colors.

      It’s not in master because nobody did it yet! 🙂 I am super supportive of someone doing it!

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Color accent is a really great addition to the settings.
    Only missing breeze settings for me now would be to change the grey top bar of windows to other color.
    I know how to do this for the adressbar, but have no idea how to change the menubar/toolbar as it seems to be manage be breeze code and not just svg file.

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    Reply

    1. You need to change the color scheme’s “Header Normal Background” color to achieve this. And “Header Alternate Background” controls the inactive appearance.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. After testing a little bit, I was able to change “Colors” from dark to white with:
      [Colors:Window]
      ForegroundNormal=…

      However, this is not a real solution as it is use everywhere in the window (it is the the text color of the settings button, for example “highlight changed settings”), this seems strange to me could this be that the “Colors” text color is not using the correct/logical color attribute ?

      Like

  4. I have just tested Accent colors and I find them a very cool option. The only thing that is missing (as it seems to me) is an extra option to the right of the pre-defined list of accents which should allow setting a user-configurable accent color (invoking color picker, for example).
    Great addition anyway even as it is.

    Btw new overview effect looks promising but very basic (expected of course). For now it needs to gain all features that Parachute has in order to become a great new thing to show-off 🙂 But I think that Desktop Grid should still be saved since it provides an other way of representing of virtual desktops and windows that many people seem to like very much and it is not actually competing with Overview like Present Windows does.

    Night Color is an interesting beast… It somewhat works but:
    1) when set to detect current location and when proxy auto-config is enabled it causes a substantial delay in starting of Plasma shell until it finally communicates with Mozilla servers.
    2) when set to manual location it often does not apply itself during logging in, I have to disable it and enable again with its applet on a panel. Custom time acts the same afair.

    Still, I’m very happy to see this week’s improvements as always! Especially everything related to multiple monitors, Wayland and Breeze evolution. The best thing is that I don’t have to fiddle with custom Kvantum and GTK themes anymore since Breeze looks more and more beautiful with each respective commit.
    Thank you Plasma devs!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. Oh and one more thing: why not replace Magic Lamp with Yet Another Magic Lamp? The latter looks just dope.

      Like

  7. Thank you so much! These articles really show how much effort goes into KDE ecosystem every single day. Just donated 250€, hope it helps to further improve and spread the word about KDE.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  8. Hi Nate,
    Thanks a lot for your hard work! (and everyone else’s , of course).
    There is one thing I wanted to point out. I have a laptop with a 10 bit depth display, and I decided to make use of it. I found this page https://linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_enable_10-bit_color_on_Linux where the working and non-working applications are listed, and KDE was listed as non-working. I digged up a bit more, I found this bug report:https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423014 that explains how to “fix” KDE, and it works great. I wrote a comment on the first link, but then I was wondering why is it not enabled by default? I was you were also affected by the bug, so that puzzled me even more.
    Do you think it makes sense to open a bug report about it?
    Thanks!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. A developer needs to make the fix to ensure that it doesn’t break for anyone else in a different way.

      Like

  12. RE Accent colors:
    Definitely a HUGE improvement. Massive props to @cblack!
    However, this feature gives me some ideas on how to further improve it:
    1) This might deserve to be on the homepage of Settings, it is a significant enough change, and might be needed more than once per user.
    2) Color Schemes or Accent colors + Light/Dark themes? There might be a great deal of confusion here. I would simplify the colors KCM a bit: have a Light/Dark toggle, this accent color chooser (maybe with a “Custom” button), and a “More…” button, which would lead to the good ol’ color scheme grid, as a subpage (back arrow appears at the top). Maybe Night Color is more of a color setting and less Display, so it could be on the new simplified Color page…

    Liked by 1 person

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  13. The Night Colour KCM improvements are nice. The only thing I am still missing is a separate bar for also reducing the day-time (default) colour temperature. I think I had already filed a feature request about this some time ago 🙂

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