This week a huge new feature landed in Konsole: it now reflows the text when you resize the window! This feature can be turned off if you don’t like it, but comes on by default. It works really well. Thanks very much to Carlos Alves and Tomaz Canabrava for this work! It will be released in Konsole 21.04.

Other New Features

Gwenview now lets you optionally use a solid black color while in full screen view (Antonio Prcela, Gwenview 21.04):

Dolphin now lets you configure whether newly-opened tabs go at the end of the tab bar, or after the current tab (Anthony Fieroni, Dolphin 21.04):

Ark now supports ARJ archives (Natsumi Higa, Ark 21.04)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle now lets you change the default screenshot file format when using a non-English language (Nicolas Fella, Spectacle 20.12.2)

Elisa no longer crashes when you enqueue a song accessed using the filesystem browser view (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12.2)

Adding radio streams in Elisa now works again (Sven Marquardt, Elisa 20.12.2)

Elisa’s “Show current track” button once again works (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12.2)

The “Apply” button of Elisa’s settings window now activates and deactivates at the correct times (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 21.04)

When using a vertical panel, the date displayed below the clock no longer sometimes becomes huge (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

Plasma no longer freezes when an app sends many notifications in quick succession (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed various issues with Breeze theme context menu borders sometimes being invisible or pure black (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

The Global Menu applet now updates properly when focus is changed to or from a GTK app (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

When pulling up the virtual keyboard on the login or lock screen, the password field now remains focused, so the characters you type no longer disappear into the void without manually re-focusing it first (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

After enabling any calendar plugins in the Digital Clock, the calendar panel now appears instantly, rather than requiring Plasma to be restarted first (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

Discover’s sidebar header no longer sometimes overlaps the contents after resizing the window (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed a case where a newly-created panel could be placed on the wrong screen in a multi-screen setup (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner once again parses and interprets hexadecimal input correctly (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

Country code labels in System Settings’ Keyboard page are now legible when using a light color scheme with a Dark Plasma theme (or the reverse) (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Aborting a change in System Setting’ Users page by canceling the authentication dialog no longer causes the changes to be applied anyway (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

KDE Connect no longer sometimes crashes when it gets spammed with notifications (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.79)

Kirigami icons in apps now consume a bit less memory, which will appreciably reduce memory usage for apps that have a lot of icons (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.79)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin now lets you decompress multiple archive files at a time via the context menu item (Elvis Angelaccio, Ark 20.12.2)

Ark’s preview window now closes when you hit the default “close window” shortcut (typically Ctrl+W) (Méven Car, Ark 21.04)

Ctrl+clicking on a Places panel item in Dolphin now opens it in a new tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 21.04)

System Settings’ Login Screen (SDDM) page has been rewritten which fixes a bunch of bugs and makes it look nicer and more consistent (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21):

It’s now possible to drag QML-based apps from empty areas of their headers and backgrounds, just like QWidgets-based apps (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.79 with Plasma 5.21)

Plasma’s “microphone is being used” indicator now tells you which microphone is being used in its tooltip (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Default Applications page now supports the “Highlight default settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

The Global Menu applet now respects Fitts’ law by allowing you to slide your cursor from one menu to another one on the row of pixels that is touching the screen edge (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Splash Screen page now lives in the Appearance category (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

The “Get new Plasma Widgets” dialog now uses the much nicer new-style version (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21):

KDE apps no longer show Docker volumes in their Places panels (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.79)

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.

This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations. In addition, it brings support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. one 144Hz screen and one 60Hz screen! This very exciting work was completed by Vlad Zahorodnii and will land in Plasma 5.21.

But that’s not all: Plasma also got a brand new Kickoff menu, which was rewritten from the ground up and fixes more than two thirds of the open issues in the bug tracker! It features a double-pane UI with better keyboard, mouse, touch, and accessibility, RTL support, an alphabetical “All Applications” view, a grid-style favorites view, power actions visible by default with labels, and much more. Here it is:

I’d like to offer a big thanks to Mikel Johnson for this excellent contribution, which will also land in Plasma 5.21. People who liked the old Kickoff can download it from store.kde.org using the “Get new widgets” button in the “Add Widgets” panel. Search for “Legacy Kickoff”.

But there’s one more really big cool thing: The Plasma Audio Volume applet now has a little visualizer for the current recording level and output volume!

Gone are the days of being embarrassed during a meeting because your microphone is muted or way too sensitive. This lovely improvement was contributed by David Edmundson and David Redondo, and also lands in Plasma 5.21.

But that’s not all:

Other New Features

Konsole now lets you select which text editor is opened when you Ctrl+click on a text file to open it (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Kate can now open files beginning with a colon from the command line (Ahmad Samir, Kate 21.04)

Right-clicking on an ISO image in Dolphin no longer imposes such a long delay before the context menu appears (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 21.04)

Dolphin’s in-toolbar breadcrumbs bar/URL navigator is now sized correctly the first time you open Dolphin (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.04)

Filelight now shows the correct amount of free space on a disk (Jakob Erzar, Filelight 21.04)

Filelight’s tooltip is now positioned correctly in multi-screen setups (Teemu Patana, Filelight 21.04)

The screen locker no longer sometimes consumes 100% of the CPU’s resources (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.7 and 5.21)

The Folder View applet now has a sane layout when used on a vertical panel greater than 50px thick (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.7 and 5.21)

Fixed one of the most common ways that Plasma could crash when interacting with screen-related settings (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

When Discover and the Emoji picker are already open but unfocused, activating them via their System Tray icons or global shortcuts now raise the existing windows properly (David Edmundson and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed the Network Speed Widget for people who were seeing that it didn’t work properly for them some of the time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

The “Get new [thing]” dialog now shows recently-installed content properly when you activate its “Installed” filter (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.79)

User Interface Improvements

Opening and closing split views in Dolphin is now animated (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.04):

Kate’s “Quick Open” panel now supports fuzzy matching (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Notifications about items moved to the trash no longer give you the option to open the item, because that’s just silly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

After you click on the “Connect” button in the Plasma network list, the inline password field no longer runs away from you if the list is re-ordered (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ KWin Scripts and Accessibility pages now respect the “Highlight changed settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

The Maximize and Fullscreen animations now use the standard animation easing curve (in/out cubic) (Alex Rosca, Plasma 5.21):

When setting up a KWin window rule, the default value for each newly-added property is now “Apply initially”, not “Do not affect” (Michael Tunnell, Plasma 5.21)

The clipboard applet now closes when you select a history entry with the keyboard, same as when you do so using the mouse (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Dolphin and other KDE apps now display thumbnail previews for ancient .ANI animated windows cursor files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.79)

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.

KDE people mostly spent the time on a well-deserved break this week, but we still managed to get some things done. 🙂 Check it out:

New Features

Kate’s CTags plugin now includes a “Go to symbol” feature (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Dolphin now lets you modify the entries in the context menu so you can remove items you never ever use (Duong Do Minh Chau, Dolphin 21.04):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular now more reliably recognizes Markdown files for what they are so it can render them correctly (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12.1)

Further improved the speed of Kate’s search feature, nearly doubling it for the case of very long files (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Konsole’s terminal bell feature now triggers the system bell too (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04)

KRunner’s windows runner (which finds open windows) now has tiny little thumbnail images again (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner’s history view now works properly with the mouse (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

The progress bar that appears in a “file is being downloaded” notification now renders correctly in all circumstances (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.78)

Mnemonics (those little horizontal lines that appear below letters when you hold down the alt key) now work for Plasma buttons and tabs (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.78)

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s settings window has been modernized to use the common FormLayout style (David Hurka, Okular 21.04):

Dolphin now makes it a bit more obvious how you connect to a remote server whose URL you know when you click on the Network item in the Places panel (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 21.04):

You can now middle-click or scroll on the entire selection area for System Tray icons, rather than just on the little icon itself (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

When searching for power-related actions in KRunner (e.g. “Shut down,” “restart,” etc), KRunner now matches partial strings and finds the actions by their English words even when your system language is set to something else (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now show the dragged text while it’s being dragged (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.78)

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.

Merry Christmas everyone! We have some nice holiday presents for you:

First of all, KDE’s FUSE-based remote location mounter kio-fuse got its first stable release, which means it can now be pre-installed by distros.

That’s not all: we have a new KDE Matrix-based chat app: NeoChat! This app is a fork of Spectral, which a few months ago appeared to have been abandoned by its developer. Carl Schwan and Tobias Fella decided to resurrect it as a KDE project, and they’ve done a smashing job bringing it into the fold. In addition to being a very nice desktop app, it also runs on Plasma mobile and there are early Android builds. I’ve been using it for the last month, and even in an early beta state, I already like it better than Element and every other Matrix client I’ve tried. Check out the official release announcement here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/23/announcing-neochat-1.0-the-kde-matrix-client/

But wait, there’s more:

New Features

Kate now has a new off-by-default but very cool plugin that will visualize colors for various textual color codes, and let you edit them graphically using the standard systemwide color picker! (Jan Paul Batrina, Kate 21.04):

Dolphin now lets you set its “homepage” to non-local locations including arbitrary KIOSlaves, such as remote://, baloosearch:// and so on (Derek Christ, Dolphin 21.04)

KRunner’s history is now activity-aware by default! This means for example that there will no longer be a data leak if you use an activity with history turned off (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

You can now optionally (and it’s off by default) have your system automatically apply available updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21):

There is now a Breeze GTK theme for GTK4-based apps! (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

Wayland

The KRunner Windows runner (which lets you find and switch to open windows) now works on Wayland (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular is now more resistant to crashing in the face of some malformed PDF files (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12.1)

Okular now returns the correct search results when your search term includes the “Å” character (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12.1)

Dolphin once again scrolls properly when using non-touchpad device with vertical as well as horizontal scrolling capabilities, such as a mouse with a wheel that can tilt from side-to-side in addition to spinning (Eduard Manta, Dolphin 20.12.1

Gwenview’s JPEG save quality chooser in the Save As dialog now saves and restores its value properly (Miklós Márton, Gwenview 20.12.1)

Kate’s find-and-replace speed is now dramatically faster when working with very large files (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Changes in the key repeat rate no longer require a logout or reboot (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 5.18.7)

Plasma no longer crashes when visiting the Weather applet’s Units tab for the second time (Willyanto Willyanto, Plasma 5.20.5)

The System Tray’s expander arrow no longer sometimes disappears when there are only a small number of items in the expanded view (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20.5)

Made Plasma even lighter on CPU resources while MPRIS-compliant audio and video players are playing media (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

The kglobalaccel daemon will no longer try to restart and then repeatedly crash while logging out, which could block logging back in (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.77)

Dolphin no longer crashes when you move or copy files and click the “Apply to all” checkbox in the overwrite dialog (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.78)

System Settings’ Custom Shortcuts page is once again able to, well, record custom shortcuts! (Weng Xuetian, Frameworks 5.78)

The Breeze icon theme now includes the image-missing icon, which somehow makes various GTK apps not crash. I guess they really really want this icon! (Henry Heino, Frameworks 5.78)

User Interface Improvements

System Settings’ KRunner page now supports the “Highlight changed settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

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.

This week we did a little bit of everything, and there should be things that make all kinds of people happy. So let’s just jump right in!

New Features

Okular now lets you digitally sign documents! Note that this feature makes use of a digital signature, not a picture of your handwritten signature. This feature was sponsored by the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04)

Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now have a new feature to swap the selected text with the top item in the clipboard (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.78)

All KDE software now supports the AV1 image format when the libavif library is installed, including displaying thumbnails in Dolphin and other apps (Daniel Novomeský, Frameworks 5.78)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin no ever gets in a situation where it always tries to execute executable JavaScript files instead of opening them, when in a different context you’ve previously told it to always execute executable files (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 20.12.1)

Fixed a common crash-on-launch bug in Dolphin and a case where Dolphin could crash when you open a new tab while there was text in the search field (Anthony Fieroni, Dolphin 20.12.1)

Dolphin no longer crashes when you try to drag a disk in the Places panel (Chris Holland, Dolphin 20.12.1)

Elisa’s “Force Filesystem Indexing” option is now remembered in the config window correctly (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12.1

Hugely increased the performance and speed of searching through large documents in Kate (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Kate’s Quick Open panel now always opens the correct item (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Improved the character placement in various command-line apps run using Konsole (Oswald Buddenhagen, Konsole 21.04)

The Emoji selector once again opens to display its “Recent” page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.5)

Improved compatibility with multi-monitor setups using different scale factors for each monitor in the Plasma Wayland Session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

When you Alt+Tab to an XWayland window in the Plasma Wayland session, mouse wheel scrolling now always works properly in the window (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21)

The Global Menu applet now works properly in the Plasma Wayland session for XWayland windows (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings Users page no longer fails to set an avatar image when given a very large file; it now resizes it to fit (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

The Lock/Logout applet once again works properly (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner now correctly evaluates single-digit factorial expressions (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

The KGlobalAccel daemon no longer crashes–either once or repeatedly–when logging out of your user account or shutting down the computer (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed the most common crash afflicting all KDE software: when graphics drivers are updated but before the system is restarted, and hardware acceleration is no longer available. Now the affected software will fall back to software rendering rather than crashing (Piotr Henryk Dabrowski, Frameworks 5.78)

Fixed one of the most common ways that an app could crash while downloading or updating Get New [Thing] content, and a less common-way that it would happen (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.78)

Plasma panels no longer show a weird black line when compositing is disabled (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.78)

The file dialogs are now capable of opening files whose name begins with a colon (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.78)

Custom shortcuts set to activate Plasma applets are no longer sometimes lost after rebooting (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.78)

Improved the efficiency of Plasma’s SVG caching system, leading to a small but measurable performance improvement everywhere throughout Plasma (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.78)

The Plasma calendar widget no longer lets you try to display negative years, which would make Plasma crash (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.78)

User Interface Improvements

In Kate’s tab switcher panel, you can now close the currently selected document by hitting the Ctrl+W keyboard shortcut (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

The System Settings Desktop Session page has had its user interface rewritten in QML for a cleaner, more modern appearance (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.21):

Reverted the automount defaults changes announced last week because the new Disks & Devices behavior makes them largely unnecessary (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Screen Locking and Compositing pages now support the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

Re-added the option to make the Disks & Devices popup not automatically open when a new device is plugged in, because people articulated reasonable and valid use cases for it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Made a few more tweaks to the Audio Volume applet, including moving the tab bar to the bottom, always hiding inactive devices, and moving all the toolbuttons up to the header row, as with other applets in Plasma 5.21 (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

On Discover’s reviews sheet, datestamps for individual reviews are now displayed using a format appropriate for your locale (Tabor Nagy, Plasma 5.21)

On Discover’s “Updates” page, the position of the “Update” and “Check for Updates” actions has been swapped (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

You can now enter relative paths in the URL Navigators used in various KDE apps. For example if you’re inside your home folder, you can enter “Documents” into the URL navigator and be taken there as expected (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.78)

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.

This week we focused a lot on the little usability details that make software a joy to use! A lot of really exciting longer-term work is underway too, some of which you can read about on Vlad Zahorodnii’s blog. But that stuff is still in progress, so until it’s merged, check out this stuff:

New Features

Elisa now lets you repeat the current track over and over and over again if you want (Carson Black, Elisa 21.04):

Plasma’s Timers widget now has a page listing all the predefined timers, which allows you to modify them and add your own (Łukasz Korbel, Plasma 5.21):

You can now set a fixed icon size for the items in the Open/Save dialogs’ Places panel sidebar (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.78):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When using Elisa’s Files view, pressing the Play or Enqueue buttons on grid items now works (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12.1)

Elisa no longer spikes Plasma’s CPU usage at all while playing music (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12.1)

Spectacle is no longer sometimes slow and laggy when taking more than one screenshot in quick succession (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.12.1)

Meetings/screencasts using WebRTC now work in the Plasma Wayland session! (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.20.5)

The lock and login screen virtual keyboard no longer covers up the password field when it appears (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.20.5)

When viewing the details of an app in Discover, a funny little tooltip for the app’s license no longer always appears; now it’s only visible when you hover over the link to the full text of its license, as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.5)

The Comics applet now displays icons in the tab bar’s tabs, like it was always supposed to (Arnav Rawat, Plasma 5.20.5):

The Bluetooth applet’s placeholder message now displays the correct text when Bluetooth is disabled (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

When you change your user avatar in the System Settings Users page, the image displayed in the list of users now also changes immediately (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.21)

Back and forward navigation buttons in Kirigami-based software no longer sometimes overlap the name of the current page (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.78)

Install and Remove buttons in Discover no longer look slightly bizarre and have an invisible icon; now they use the standard style and re-color the icon (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.78):

KDE app window sizes and positions are once again remembered correctly in KDE software run on Windows (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.78)

KDE app windows no longer sometimes open in a maximized state when they were not maximized at the moment they were last closed (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.78)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s configuration window has been given a UI overhaul and modernization (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.04):

Elisa’s number of remaining tracks indicator now lives in the Playlist’s footer alongside the total number of tracks indicator, where it can never accidentally overlap with any other text (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.04):

The Bluetooth applet and System Settings page now only display paired devices; available devices are shown in a separate list only visible when adding new devices (Nicolas Fella, 5.20.5)

There are now default shortcuts set for moving the active window to another virtual desktop (Meta+Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys) and to another screen (Meta+Shift+arrow keys) (Thiago Sueto, Plasma 5.21)

When receiving files via Bluetooth, the notification displayed on screen now has information about how many files are remaining, and shows an “Open in File Manager” button when completed (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

Improved the appearance of user avatars in the user avatar chooser view (Carson Black, Plasma 5.21):

After the first time you manually mount a removable disk, it will by default be automounted automatically the on all subsequent times when you attach it (Claudius Ellsel, Plasma 5.21)

The default actions of “Mount” and “Unlock Vault” in Plasma’s Disks & Devices and Plasma Vaults applets (respectively) have been changed to “Mount and Open” and “Unlock and Open” to save you an extra step of having to manually open your file manager and navigate to the newly-available locations. For people who don’t want this, the old “Mount without opening in file manager” and “Unlock Vault without showing in file manager” actions are still present, but in the expanded view rather than used as default actions (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

Discover’s task progress sheet now displays the current download speed as well as an estimated time of completion (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21):

The detailed icon size popup in System Settings’ Icons page no longer confusingly offers to let you configure the size of “Desktop” icons, because it didn’t actually change the size of files and folders on the desktop (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

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.

A big new Plasma feature was merged this week that I’m very excited to present!

Now, when you press-and-hold a key, a small palette will appear offering alternative characters similar to the one you’re holding down. This makes it enormously easier to type accented characters from other languages or symbols uncommon in your language without having to change your keyboard layout or memorize compose key sequences. It is super intuitive and awesome to use:

You can also use it to type alternative symbols, such as currency symbols uncommon in your locale. This is useful if, for example, you live in the USA but deal with monetary sums denominated in Euros a lot, or the reverse:

Naturally, the feature can be disabled (on the System Settings keyboard page) if you prefer the current behavior to repeat the held-down key.

The feature is mostly completed and merged, but a few bits are still remaining, including full integration with GTK apps, and compatibility with other input methods. For now, adventurous people using git master packages can test it out by setting QT_IM_MODULE=plasmaim in their environment.

This work was done by Carson Black and will be included with Plasma 5.21 by default. Thanks Carson!

Other New Features

Gwenview now lets you enter arbitrary zoom values using an interactive spinbox that replaces the static label showing the current zoom value (Antonio Prcela, Gwenview 21.04)

Window rules can now be duplicated (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

The standard file overwrite dialog now has an option to overwrite older files automatically (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.77)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa no longer causes Plasma to noticeably increase in CPU usage while playing music (Sophie Kums, Elisa 20.12)

Elisa now restores the Playlist contents successfully when any of its items were added using the Files view (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12)

Clicking on a song navigated to using Elisa’s Files view now adds it to the playlist rather than nonsensically taking you to the Now Playing page (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12)

Elisa’s Spacebar shortcut to play and pause the music now always works on matter which language you’re using the app in (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Konsole is once again capable of displaying bold red text properly (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.12)

Okular’s support for FictionBook documents now includes the ability to properly display tables (Marat Radchenko, Okular 21.04)

The EnvCan Canadian weather provider now works again in the weather applet (Tiernan Hubble, Plasma 5.18.7)

The System Settings Users page now displays the correct content the first time you open it (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.5)

Fixed a variety of visual glitches in headerbar window decoration buttons in GTK3 headerbar apps (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.20.5)

KRunner’s feature to start composing an email when given a mailto:// link now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Task Manager tooltips now show thumbnail window previews for Electron and Java apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Discover no longer shows broken text for application reviews where the version of the app being reviewed is not known for some reason (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Improved Discover’s performance in the Plasma Wayland session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when clicking on the “Get new Scripts” button on the KWin Scripts page (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.77)

Removing items that were installed via the Get New [Thing] system is now more reliable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.77)

Navigating to other folders using the keyboard in URL navigators once again works (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.77)

Plasma scrollbars now are now drawn in the correct color when using a light Plasma theme with a dark color scheme for apps (Mikel Johnson, Frameworks 5.77)

Samba shares once again display the correct icon when shown in a Dolphin tab (Méven Car, Plasma 5.77)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s “Show Playlist” button is no longer visible in Party Mode (aka maximized view) since in that view, the thing it controls isn’t visible anyway (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Dolphin now displays placeholder messages for empty views and search results, similar the the placeholder text shown throughout Plasma applets, System Settings pages, and various QML-based software (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 21.04):

Dolphin’s rubberband/box selection effect now fades out when released, just like the one in Plasma’s Folder View (Carson Black, Dolphin 21.04)

Dolphin’s “Filter…” action was relocated to the Edit menu to live next to the “Search…” action, because they are related in functionality (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.04):

Discover now suggests installing Snap support if you try to open a URL to a Snap app when support for it is not currently installed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

The Media Player applet’s album art area now stretches to fill the entire horizontal area, with no side margins (Mikel Johnson and Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21):

The rubberband/box selection effect now has rounded corners for a more Breeze-like style (Carson Black, Plasma 5.21)

The Places Panel in file dialogs now matches Dolphin’s new behavior of only highlighting a Places Panel entry when that exact location (not a sub-folder) is shown in the main view (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.77)

When you try to unmount a mounted NFS share on which is the location of any open files, the thing you tried to use to unmounted it now tells you that this is the problem, just like it does for physical disks (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.77)

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.

This week we worked very hard not only fixing bugs in our software, but also on triaging bugs in our venerable bug tracker, bugs.kde.org. Thanks to the coordinating efforts of Justin Zobel, the KDE BugSquad has been working harder than ever to separate the wheat from the chaff so developers can focus on what matters, rather than wading through a sea of obsolete reports and bugs that have been fixed ages ago. If this sounds like fun, please feel free to get involved! See https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging

New Features

Konsole now shows you color previews for HTML color codes! (Gustavo Carneiro, Konsole 20.12):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin will once again launch AppImages and other executable files (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when closing the Terminal panel (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.12)

Okular no longer fails to open files whose filenames include the . and # characters in various places (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12)

Text in the System Settings Autostart page is once again properly translated (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.20.4)

The Audio Volume applet pop-up no longer sometimes displays an unknown, non-functional device with the text “Device name not found” (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.20.4)

The Emoji Selector once again shows the Smilies & Emotion category (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the titlebar context menu’s “Resize” item now works on maximized windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.4)

People who had set a global shortcut for Night Color early on in its development process will now see that it works again (Michał Ziąbkowski, Plasma 5.20.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the current keyboard layout indicator now works (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Task Manager thumbnails for client-side-decorated windows are no longer visually clipped (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

In the Plasma Wayland session, tapping a titlebar button with a touchscreen now makes the menu (if any) appear at the finger’s location, not at the cursor’s location (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

In the Plasma Wayland session, deliberately killing XWayland no longer crashes the whole session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

The lock screen now resizes itself correctly to fill the whole screen after rotating a device that supports screen rotation (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

The Calendar widget now has visible text when using a dark color scheme (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21):

Sending multiple files to a Bluetooth device now works (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.77)

Text in the “Share…” menus throughout KDE software is now properly translated (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.77)

The menu that appears when dragging-and-dropping something on the desktop is now positioned on the correct screen when using a multi-screen setup (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

The clear button inside Plasma text fields no longer overlaps long text (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.77)

Progress indicator bars in Plasma notifications no longer visually overshoot their bounds in various odd conditions (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

When using Discover to perform updates that include add-ons from store.kde.org, the add-ons no longer immediately disappear the moment you click the “Update” button but rather disappear exactly when they should (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.77)

When logging out of a Plasma session, a blank session named “Unused” is no longer left behind, visible in the user switcher screen (Fabian Vogt, SDDM 0.19)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s Places panel now highlights an entry only when the main view is displaying that exact entry, not any sub-folder inside it (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Table views throughout KDE apps no longer have a vertical separator line for the last column that is one pixel too thick (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.21)

The Analog Clock applet now shows the exact time in its tooltip (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21)

KDE apps now display pretty icons for video subtitle files, TrueType font files, Math files, QEMU disk images and SquashFS images, and core dumps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.77):

How You Can Help

In addition to bug triaging mentioned earlier, you can have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover more 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.