This week we landed a lot of nice improvements for KDE’s apps, which I’ve highlighted below! Of course we didn’t forget about Plasma, so have a look-see:

New Features

Dolphin now lets you mount ISO images using a new menu item in the context menu (Kwon-Young Choi, Dolphin 20.08.0):

Konsole now lets you monitor a tab for the active process to complete (Will Westrop, Konsole 20.08.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Improved search speed/performance in Okular’s sidebar (Ahmad Samir, Okular 1.10.2)

Fixed a very common Yakuake crash (Maximilian Schiller, 20.04.2)

Fixed a common crash in Konsole when right-clicking and using Qt 5.15 (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.04.2)

Gwenview’s touch gestures now work properly when using display scaling (Steffen Hartlieb, Gwenview 20.08.0)

Notes widgets placed in a panel now display the pop-up note if clicked on when all windows are hidden or minimized (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.19.0)

Clicking on the settings button for a notification now opens the Notification settings page with that particular app focused and visible (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.19.0)

KRunner once again shows Firefox bookmarks (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.19.0)

KRunner now does a better job of handling file paths beginning with a tilde (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20)

When using Dolphin to view the desktop using the special desktop:/ URL, the amount of free space is now correctly displayed in the status bar (Ahmad Samir, Plasma 5.20.0)

Dates displayed in the file overwrite confirmation dialog now respect the date formatting of your current locale (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.71)

Deleting files from a Samba share no longer displays a notification with an inaccurate number of deleted files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.71)

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s sidebar user interface has been overhauled, with the result that it now takes up less horizontal space, is easier to show and hide quickly, has a more consistent appearance overall, and fixes many bugs (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0):

The default gesture for moving windows has been changed to Meta+click, to avoid conflicting with apps like Krita, Inkscape, and Blender which use Alt+click for their own usages. Tell all your friends and spread this information far and wide so people aren’t surprised! If you hate the new one and don’t use Krita, Blender, Inkscape, or another app which uses Alt+Click for something, you can of course change it back to Alt+click (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.20)

When dragging files from Dolphin (or elsewhere) onto the desktop, the files now end up at the location where you dragged them, rather than at the end of the last row (Radek Husek, Plasma 5.20)

The battery charge level icons displayed by the Battery And Brightness applet now reflect the current charge status more accurately (Daniel Roschka, Frameworks 5.71):

The standalone KRunner widget now closes the pop-up if you hit the Escape key while the text field is empty (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20)

When using an ultrawide screen wider than 21:9, the default horizontal panel now no longer spans the entire screen width, but rather remains at the size it would be on a 21:9 screen, horizontally centered. Also in this mode, notification pop-ups that are configured to appear close to the Notifications System Tray applet will pop up close to it rather than way far away in a corner of the screen (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0):

The new OSDs now show a percentage label for brightness and volume (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20):

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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.

After years of using Phabricator, KDE has officially begun the migration to GitLab! So far we are using it for patch review, and developer task tracking will be migrated soon. We are still using Bugzilla for bugs and feature requests as migrating those functions to GitLab is a significant project in and of itself! Already the KDE community is enjoying GitLab’s smoother workflow; why not take advantage of this and submit a merge request? 🙂

But that’s not all: big changes for Plasma 5.20 have started to land too. It promises to be a very significant release! Check it out:

New Features

• When you right-click on an underlined file in Konsole, the context menu now displays the standard “Open with” menu so you can open the file in a non-default GUI app (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 20.08.0):

  

• The Free Space Notifier has been re-implemented as a critical notification, so it’s now less likely to be missed. Also, it now monitors the root filesystem if you have your home directory on a separate partition (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• The System Settings Users page has been rewritten from scratch, which fixes most of the open bugs with the old one (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When a document opened in Okular’s Presentation View is re-loaded on disk, it no longer repeatedly shows notifications about wanting to be opened in presentation view (Arshad Husain, Okular 1.11.0)
• Discover no longer always opens on login when session restoration is in use (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.6)
• The “Apply” button in the System Settings Night Color page is now always active at the correct times (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The emoji picker window now starts searching as soon as you start typing (me: Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Fixed a crash unplugging screens on Wayland (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20.0)
• The Global Menu applet now has the correct hover behavior: you can slide the mouse over to the next menu to close the current one and open that other one (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20.0)
• When using a low-end system with only software rendering available, desktop files and folders now have an outline under their label so that they’re always visible (Bruno Gonçalves, Plasma 5.20.0):

  

• System Settings no longer crashes when opening external apps listed in the sidebar, such as openSUSE’s YaST (David Faure, Frameworks 5.71)
• The “Get New [thing]” windows no longer shows error messages twice (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s elision behavior has been refined; it no longer middle-elides long file and folder labels, but rather elides on the right, and always keeps the file extension (if present) visible after the ellipses (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.04.2)
• After taking into consideration user feedback last week about Konsole’s colorized tabs feature, the appearance was adjusted for greater usability and aesthetics (Gustavo Carneiro, Konsole 20.08.0):
  
• When Discover is loading more results, the “Still looking” label is now positioned properly, and both of the placeholder-style messages that include spinning busy indicators are now consistent in appearance (Aleix Pol Gonzales and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0 and 5.20.0):
  
• Feedback OSDs for things like volume and brightness changes are now more compact so they don’t obscure the main view so much (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• The Battery and Brightness applet now has a more comprehensible user interface for displaying apps which are preventing lock and sleep, and allowing the user to override this (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• Menu titles/section headers now look the part (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.0):
  

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• Breeze style tabs are now two pixels taller, making them consistent with the height of buttons and text fields (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.20.0)
• You’re now warned if you try to create a file with a space at the beginning or end (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.71):
  
• The mouse icon has been re-done and is now distinguishable against both light and dark backgrounds (Chris Escargot and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.71):
  
  

  
• SpinBoxes in Plasma can now have their values modified by scrolling over them or clicking/tapping-and-dragging on the number (note: this only affects SpinBoxes in Plasma, not in apps; scrolling is already implemented there and click/tap-and-drag-manipulation will be coming later) (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.71)

How You Can Help

KDE Software is made by people just like you, often on their free time! If you know a KDE developer, send them a kind note. Developers like to put on a logical face but they need love and care too, especially during trying times like these.

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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.

The KDE Plasma 5.19 beta has been released! We’re very proud of the work that’s gone into 5.19, but it is no doubt buggy and in need of QA. Please help us find all the bugs we missed! Go test it in your favorite distro; options include KDE Neon Testing or Unstable editions, openSUSE Krypton or KDE:Unstable repos, Arch’s kde-unstable repos, and probably many more I’m not familiar with (please tell me!).

But wait, there’s more…

New Features

• Konsole tabs can now be assigned colors! (Gustavo Carneiro, Konsole 20.08.0):
  
• Dolphin now has new actions to quickly move or copy the selected files in one pane of a split view into the folder in the other pane (Antonio Prcela, Dolphin 20.08.0):
  
• System Monitor widgets were completely redesigned and rewritten from scratch for greater functionality, versatility, and attractiveness (Marco Martin, David Edmundson, and Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.19):
  
• Windows can now-be-dragged-and-dropped onto items in the Activity switcher to quickly assign them to different Activities (Ivan Čukić, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The “Tools” button present on some laptop keyboard (e.g. ThinkPads) now launches System Settings when pressed (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Plasma Vaults can now use GoCryptFS as an encryption backend (Martino Pilia, Plasma 5.19.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KMail and other Kontact apps can once again connect to Google services, as Google has finally re-authorized access!
• When multiple Spectacle windows are open and set to “Active Window” mode, taking a screenshot in one of the windows no longer puts the screenshot in all of the open Spectacle windows (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.04.1)
• Fixed a bug that could cause file copies to SFTP servers to fail (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.04.2)
• Internal links in Markdown documents now work properly in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.0)
• Notification pop-ups are no longer partially visible on the lock screen on Wayland (Vlad Zagorodnii, Plasma 5.18.6)
• Apps whose desktop files end in .desktop (such as Telegram) now display their icons on Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.19)
• Copying files to a location accessed via a symlink now works again (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.71)
• Running executable script in Konsole from Dolphin and other apps now works again (Jonathan Marten, Frameworks 5.71)
• When copying files to remote locations, the amount of free space available is now checked before starting the transfer so it can’t run out of space and die in the middle (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.71)
• Error messages displayed by the “Get new [thing]” windows are now readable with dark themes, and for that matter with any arbitrary color schemes (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)

User Interface Improvements

• Okular now allows zooming in farther than 1600% (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 1.11.0):
  
• The selection of available user avatars has been hugely improved to include a variety of attractive photographic images (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.19.0):
  

  

• When opening System Settings pages from KRunner of the Kickoff Application Launcher (or other launchers), they now open in System Settings itself rather than in small isolated standalone windows (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The “Battery is low” notification now automatically disappears when the “Battery is critically low!” notification appears (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.19.0)
• When the Notifications applet has been pinned open, it no longer closes itself when you clear all notifications (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The clipboard applet now automatically closes itself (if it wasn’t pinned open) when you manually clear all items or delete the last item (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.19.0)
• There are now 48px versions of Breeze theme Places icons, which means that folders now look pixel-perfect in Dolphin when using a 48px size (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Frameworks 5.71):
  

How You Can Help

Go test that Plasma 5.19 beta! Read the first paragraph of this post to see how. 🙂

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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.

This week we have some big stuff for you, including a rewritten global shortcuts settings page, an option to remember Dolphin’s window state across launches, a fix for longstanding kerning issues with centered text in QML-based software, and much more!

New Features

• Dolphin now remembers and restores the location you were viewing, open tabs, and split views when closed and launched again. This feature is on by default, but can be turned off in the Startup page of Dolphin’s settings window (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.08.0):
  
• The System Settings Global Shortcuts page was rewritten from scratch, providing radically better usability, long-requested features such as a global search and the ability to see and configure more than two shortcuts. Nearly all the open bug reports were fixed! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.19.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Centered text throughout QML-based KDE software no longer sometimes displays terrible kerning (Arjen Hiemstra, Qt 5.15.1)
• Moving or copying files to a remote SFTP location no longer appends “.part” onto the end of the file (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.04.1)
• Restored Okular’s missing keyboard shortcuts for page view modes (David Hurka, Okular 1.10.1)
• Fixed scrolling with mouse wheels that can spin freely (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.10.1)
• In Elisa, clicking on the “Show Details” button for a song now works the second time you click it (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.1)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel no longer shows empty information in various locations; instead it just hides fields with no applicable information (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Overwriting an existing file while scanning in Skanlite no longer shows you an unnecessary second “confirm overwrite” prompt (Frederik Yin, Skanlite 2.0.2)
• Changing icon sizes in the System Settings Icons page now results in icon sizes throughout KDE software being changed immediately, rather than having to be re-launched (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.5)
• GTK-based apps installed from Flatpak are now capable of displaying folder chooser dialogs (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.19.0)
• User scripts defined in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ now always take precedence over system-level configuration in /etc/xdg/plasma-workspace/env/ when there would be a conflict (Francis Thérien, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Dragging text in Kate to the line number gutter no longer unexpectedly creates a new document (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.70)

User Interface Improvements

• Konsole’s I-beam cursor now follows the font size instead of always being the same size (Gastón Haro, Konsole 20.08.0)
• “Low Battery” notifications are now marked as critical to ensure that you get advanced warning before the “Battery critically low!” notification appears while in a full-screen app (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.19.0)
• When adjusting all font sizes using the System Settings Fonts page, the Small font is now changed to a size smaller than the general one, preserving the pre-existing size relationship between them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The System Settings Fonts page now gently guides users towards the global scaling feature if it detects an attempt to use ad-hoc methods to scale everything using fonts (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0)
• When creating a new HTML file using the “Create New…”, the created stud HTML file is now more useful and standards-compliant (Grzegorz Szymaszek, Frameworks 5.70)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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.