Today something very cool landed: Dolphin now has a dedicated “Selection Mode” you can optionally use to make the process of selecting items easier with a touchscreen or when using the default single-click setting! It even shows a toolbar of contextually-relevant actions you can perform on the selected items! When using a mouse and keyboard, you can quickly enter and exit it by pressing the spacebar, pressing-and-holding on an item in the view, or using an item in the menu. It’s completely optional, so if you like selecting files the old fashioned way, you don’t have to use it at all. Big thanks to Felix Ernst, who implemented this feature for Dolphin 22.12!
…But that’s not all! Read on for more goodies!
Other New Features
Elisa now has a Full Screen mode (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.12. Link):
You can now change the way the system formats addresses, names, and phone numbers (Akseli, en, Plasma 5.26. Link):
When using a horizontal panel, Kickoff can now be configured to display text and/or remove the icon (Denys Madureira, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Kate now lets you customize the font that the document will be printed in, right there in the Print dialog (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.98. Link)
File thumbnailers are now capable of generating preview images for .arw RAW image files (Mirco Miranda, Frameworks 5.98. Link)
User Interface Improvements
Elisa’s “Artist” view now displays a grid of the artist’s albums, rather than a sea of nondescript identical icons (Stefan Vukanović, Elisa 22.12. Link):
When you enter shuffle mode in Elisa, the currently-playing song is now always the first one in the shuffled set of songs (Dmitry Kolesnikov, Elisa 22.12. Link)
When setting properties for KWin rules, the sheet containing the list of properties now stays open until explicitly dismissed (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.26. Link)
You can now launch executable files from file searches in Kicker, Kickoff, Overview etc; you’ll now see the standard “Open or execute?” dialog as you would expect (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)
The “Get New [thing]” windows now support animated GIFs used as images, so for example, you can now preview the effects of the fancy “Burn My Windows” KWin effects that were added recently (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.98. Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, longstanding issues etc.)
The circular timeout indicator for Plasma notifications is now fully visible no matter what your screen DPI and scale factor (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)
Launchers other than Kickoff are once again capable of searching for files (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5)
Touch scrolling once again works in Kickoff (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)
Global shortcuts are now capable of launching apps that define command-line arguments in their .desktop files’ Exec= keys (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.98. Link)
Kirigami-based apps and views that use the common FormLayout component will no longer sometimes randomly freeze with certain combinations of fonts, font sizes, window sizes, and content sizes (Connor Carney, Frameworks 5.98. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 51 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
- 22 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 25 last week). Current list of bugs
- 99 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Changes not in KDE that affect KDE
That Qt bug that causes vertical scrollbars to disappear in QtQuick-based apps has been fixed upstream, and we’ll soon be backporting it to our KDE Qt Patch Collection (Mitch Curtis, a Qt version coming to you soon. Link)
…And everything else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Wow, I really love the new format of your articles, and having a list of the resolved bugs from the past week is really clever!
I have a question concerning Elisa: it doesn’t recognize some audio formats (ex: MP4 audio). I looked for a list of supported format but couldn’t find any. Is there such a list somewhere? Is it planned to support more audio formats in the future ?
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Yeah, this is planned. It’s a known issue.
Glad you like the new format!
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So excited about the improvement to the artist view in Elisa, and also having a full screen mode is amazing. With these features, I could say it’s a flawless music player for me. Just as a side-note though, I wish you could post a screenshot of the actual full screen mode of Elisa, too.
Thanks a lot to you and the community! You’re doing great work every week!
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It’s basically the same but with no window titlebar, and an “Exit Full Screen” button in the top-right corner: https://i.imgur.com/IQfpaxA.jpg
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> “When setting properties for KWin rules, the sheet containing the list of properties now stays open until explicitly dismissed (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.26. Link)”
Lowkey my favorite thing from this. As a distro-hopper, setting KWin rules again and again can be such a pain, but it is also such a powerful tool that makes things so much more convenient I’d be dumb not to use it. This should reduce the amount of time needed for me to get things all set up.
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Could you just copy ~/.config/kwinrulesrc into your new installation vs. setting them up again each time?
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Single click is default again? 😦 I thought you guys made double-click default a while ago
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I thought only sane distributors did, not upstream.
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“Dolphin now has a dedicated “Selection Mode” you can optionally use to make the process of selecting items easier with a touchscreen or when using the default single-click setting!”
I read that as ‘default single-click to select’. So still double click to launch.
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It’s still single-click to launch. This new selection mode in Dolphin is intended to make it easier to select things when using the single-click setting, as well as when using a touchscreen.
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Hopefully not and they are staying with single-click! If you are used single-click it is so much easier and intuitive than the double-click. Even for people like me, who must switch between Win and KDE….
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The population of users accustomed to single click to launch is vanishingly small in the grand scheme of things. Windows, macOS, and even ChromeOS are all single click to select. This is not a good default for KDE.
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If people want to make double-click the default, they should fork KDE, call it KurmudgeonDE, and go live on a separate planet somewhere that spins backwards.
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Single-click remains the KDE default at this point in time. There are efforts to change it, and many distros have already changed it themselves. But for now, that remains a distro customization, not the upstream default setting.
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It’s great to see Elisa has a Full Screen mode. I wish Dolphin has it too.
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Really appreciate you posting progress reports every week, thank you.
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I have 20k albums with embedded art sized 480×480, so Elisa full screen mode will mean superblurry artwork for me.
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Soooooo, don’t use it? 🙂 Or get better artwork.
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Way ahead of ya. I only listen to music on my windows computer using MusicBee, sadly nothing in linux-land comes even close. Who knows, maybe one day! I recently found this cross-platform player and it’s looking interesting, developed by some wiz-kid from India..still in its infancy though. https://github.com/harmonoid/harmonoid
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Selection mode seems pretty cool!
Will give it a try as soon as it’s out :).
However, I must confess that when I started reading I though the news was about bug #292508
( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292508 )
Then I realised it was something entirely different (still also cool).
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Hi, as thomas_rossi pointed there are some format/extensions incompatibilites (eg opus file with an ogg ext)
also seems Elisa doesn’t load coverart when playing file outside of library (like open with elisa)
btw I’d like to make dolphin play supported audio file when cursor is on it (maybe a preview of middle 30s), as old ubuntu did.
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The new selection mode for Dolphin is great! I’m assuming that it also becomes activated by long presses on touch screens?
“Kickoff can now be configured to display text and/or remove the icon”… I really appreciate this, and I can see that it entails a lot of developer round trips to get right.
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Activating on long press with a touchscreen is intended and coming soon. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457975.
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Current Dolphin on my system is 22.12, and I can’t see this selection mode. I would like to test it to see if I like it, but there is nothing in settings. Marking a few files does nothing new. I’m confused.
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Ah, nevermind. I just realized you wrote it’s for touchscreens or single-click mode. I don’t use any of them, hence this is probably not showing. Sorry for bothering.
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Even for double-clickers, you should be able to access it by hitting the spacebar.
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Yeah, space bar works! Yay!
Although, I would have never stumbled upon it. It’s well hidden, along with so many awesome Plasma features. Plasma really needs the Welcome app. The problem is, a general Welcome app would never show all what Plasma has to offer, it’s too many, and it’s changing too fast…
Anyway, thanks for the tip!
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