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):

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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.

A bunch of KDE apps received many lovely new features, bugfixes, and user interface improvements this week! And Plasma too, of course. 🙂 Let’s get right to it:

New Features

Elisa now lets you edit tracks’ metadata from inside the app! (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12):

Elisa now lets you easily find the on-disk location of each song (me: Nate graham, Elisa 20.12):

Konsole now has a configurable toolbar (which you can of course hide if you don’t like it) (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.04):

You can now download new KRunner Runners from store.kde.org straight from the System Settings page! (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin no longer frequently crashes when typing in the Filter Bar (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin once again shows the correct number of files inside symlinked folders (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin is now more reliable and less likely to freeze in the face of network flakiness (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin’s ISO mounter plugin no longer fails to mount the same ISO twice and now correctly unmounts the underlying loop device too (Kwon-Young Choi, Dolphin 20.12)

Middle-clicking on tabs in Kate once again closes them (Robert-André Mauchin, Kate 20.12)

In Elisa, touch scrolling and fast scrolling by holding down the Shift key while scrolling now work (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Elisa now accepts album art for albums with the art in a file named albumart.[jpg|png] (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

When Elisa is loading a view, the progress spinner no longer overlaps some placeholder text (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Plasma Disks no longer sometimes crashes when mounting a USB disk (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.20.3)

The Lock screen’s “Switch User” action is once again visible for people using distros that ship an up-to-date version of systemd (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.20.3)

After mounting an external disk, the Disks & Devices popup no longer hilariously/terrifyingly jumps between different screens of a multi-screen setup when each screen has its own panel with a System Tray on it (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20.3

Icons in the Alt+Tab task switcher are once again displayed correctly for a wide variety of apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.3)

Discover can once again install locally-downloaded distro package files (e.g. .rpm and .deb files) (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20.4)

Right-clicking on something in the Kicker or Kickoff launcher menus now causes the context menu to appear instantly the first time (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.4)

In the System Settings Cursors page, the menu of available cursor sizes now displays those cursors with their real sizes (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.4):

In the Plasma Wayland session, Dragging tabs from Firefox over the desktop no longer crashes the whole session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

Context menus for 3rd-party System Tray items no longer sometimes stack up on top of each other when right-clicking on multiple consecutive applets (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

On the System Settings Window Decorations page, the border size text no longer gets cut off when using a scale factor or a language with longer text than English (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21):

The sound check feature on the System Settings Audio Volume page no longer causes your subwoofer to make odd noises (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

Circular timeout indicators inside notifications are no longer invisible under certain circumstances (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

After updating items from store.kde.org using either Discover or the Get New [Thing] Window, some of those things no longer inaccurately show up as updateable the next time you check for updates (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.76)

Fixed one of the ways that Discover could crash when performing updates that include any add-ons (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.77)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now re-assign keyboard shortcuts without accidentally triggering their actions in the process (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

Using Meta+Tab as a shortcut in the System Settings Shortcuts page no longer results in the word “tab” being visually duplicated in the shortcut chooser box (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

When using a fractional scale factor, Konsole no longer displays ugly horizontal lines in some places with some font sizes (Someone awesome, Qt 5.15.1)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s URL navigator now lives in its toolbar! (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 20.12):

Hovering the cursor over a Places Panel item now displays a little tooltip with the full path to that location (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12):

All of the appearance-related pages in System Settings have now been re-organized to live inside a top-level “Appearance” list item which takes you to the Global Themes page, to make it more clear that Global Themes can potentially affect all of them (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

You can probably see a lot of minor visual glitches in the above video; we’ll try to have then fixed by the final Plasma 5.21 release.

The way you add and switch between timezones in the digital clock applet has been totally overhauled to clarify the difference between changing the systemwide timezone and changing the timezone in the applet, and to make it easier to change the systemwide time zone (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings KWin Rules page now warns you when you try to set rules for a window not managed by KWin which can’t be affected by window rules (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

Further refined the appearance of the Media Player applet (Mikel Johnson, Plasma 5.21):

When you set a custom keyboard shortcut to activate the System Tray’s popup, the shortcut now also closes it if it’s currently open as well, as it does for other applets (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

The Networks applet now has its search field integrated into the header area and visible by default, rather than hidden behind a button (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

Separators between list items in Kirigami-based apps now have a more subtle and less attention-getting appearance (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.77):

The desktop drag-and-drop menu no longer has an unnecessary extra separator in it (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

Section headers in Kirigami-based apps now word-wrap properly when they are very long or when their window/view is very narrow (Carson Black, Frameworks 5.77)

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Phew, that felt more like a month’s worth of work. I am constantly in awe of the KDE community’s productivity!

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 the new Plasma System Monitor app had its first independent release! This app is a future replacement for the current KSysGuard monitoring app, and features a radically better user interface, an overview page with “just the facts”, simpler and more powerful customizability, and an easy to understand “Applications” page that shows individual apps rather than processes.

This app has been in development for almost two years and it’s really cool! We’re expecting it to eventually replace KSysGuard once it’s gotten some more use in the wild, but for now it is an independent release. Distros should be packaging it soon. Please install it and give it a try! Bug reports should be filed here.

But we kept plugging away on other stuff too…

New Features

Dolphin’s Places Panel now shows inline free space indicators for mounted disks in the Places Panel (Chris Holland, Dolphin 20.12):

Kate now supports the Zig language server (Matheus C. França, Kate 20.12)

Changing your user password now prompts you to change your KWallet password to match it so that if they previously matched, they don’t accidentally drift out of sync, which is baffling and rage-inducing when it happens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

Plasma Network manager’s OpenVPN module now supports multiple types of compression (Alfred Toth, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s git integration plugin no longer interferes with command-line-based git interactions (Sebastian Englbrecht, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin no longer sometimes consumes 100% of CPU resources while the Folders panel is open and showing folders that don’t have any sub-folders (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when re-arranging split views or closing split views (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.12)

Back and Forward navigation in Okular after using internal links now works again (Kezi Olio, Okular 20.12)

When using Spectacle’s feature to return focus to the app when pressing the screenshot key while it’s already open, now doing so will un-minimize the app if it happens to be minimized (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.12)

When using Kate’s vi mode, the search field no longer disappears if focused again while it’s already open (Jan Paul Batrina, Kate 20.12)

The “switch user” action is once again visible in the Kickoff Application launcher for people using distros with an older systemd–for real this time! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.3)

Switching users now actually works again after you invoke the action (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.20.3)

All the shutdown options are once again always visible for all people in the Kickoff application launcher (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.20.3)

Fixed an obscure way that the Plasma Wayland session could crash (Lewis Lakerink, Plasma 5.20.3)

Opening the Network applet’s speed graph no longer erroneously causes the graph to show an implausibly high spike in data transfer that messes up the graph scale for all subsequent data (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, opening a laptop’s lid now immediately wakes it up, instead of this only happening after you press a key (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.3)

The System Settings Window Rules page no longer automatically scrolls itself after creating a new rule and hovering the cursor over the list of rules when there are already a ton of rules in the list (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.20.3)

The “number of CPU cores” sensor now displays the right information (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

When using the Plasma Wayland session with multiple virtual desktops, the name of the virtual desktop is now correct in Task Manager tooltips (Lewis Lakerink, Plasma 5.20)

Plasma applet headers now use the correct colors when using with Breeze Dark Plasma theme (Dominic Hayes, Frameworks 5.76)

Fixed a common crash in System Settings when opening various QML-based pages (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.76)

Notifications for file move or copy operations no longer include skipped files in the total number of files printed at the end (David Faure, Frameworks 5.76)

Thumbnails and previews throughout KDE software are now able to render 16-bit PSD files (Gary Wang, Frameworks 5.76)

User Interface Improvements

Inertial scrolling using the mouse now works when the cursor wraps around vertically after reaching the top or bottom of the window (David Hurka, Okular 1.11.3)

When you share an image to Imgur in Gwenview, there’s now a little notification in the UI that tells you it worked, shows the the link, and automatically copies it to the clipboard for you–just like in Spectacle (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 20.12

The Samba server authentication dialog has been slimmed down and made more flexible so it can accommodate multiple different login types, with a handy help tooltip that helps you understand the various options (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.12):

Sheets in Kirigami-based software now close when you hit the Escape key (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.76)

Draggable list items in Kirigami-based software now use the grabby hand cursor when the cursor is hovered over or dragging on the grab handle (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.76)

The System Setting Accessibility page has been rewritten in QML and given a fancy new user interface (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21):

System Tray applets now all have a visible Configure button in their header, as well as a hamburger menu showing all additional actions. This makes all System Tray applets full functionality 100% usable on touch and without having to right-click anything (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21):

Check it out: SSD headerbars in the Plasma System Tray lol!

Icons in the System Tray expanded view are no longer quite so close to the header (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Notifications page now supports the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

The little pop-up menu that appears when you hover over a Panel applet while in Edit Mode now looks prettier (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21):

After last week’s mixed feedback about the new UI style for the System Settings Audio page, we made a few changes which should hopefully improve it a bit (with more to come): We now use standard style section headers, and the “Show Inactive Devices” button has now been moved to the footer area (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21):

Changed the menu text for the “turn off do not disturb” feature to be a bit more clear (Thiago Sueto, Plasma 5.20):

Those of you who liked the old Alt+Tab switcher’s behavior of placing minimized windows at the end of the list can now get that old behavior behavior back by adding MoveMinimizedWindowsToEndOfTabBoxFocusChain=true to the [TabBox] group
of your ~/.config/kwinrc file. In the future we may add a GUI to control this, but the the moment it is a hidden feature that requires manually modifying the config file (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Icons in collapsed sidebars in various Kirigami-based apps (e.g. and the Emoji input panel and the new Plasma System Monitor) are now horizontally centered as expected (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.76)

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 the bug squashing continues at full speed! We’ve made short work of tons of bugs throughout our software stack, including the infamous login sound bug, some very important and longstanding issues with extended attributes, and a ton of quality-of-life improvements for the Plasma Wayland session.

But we also managed to add a few nice new features that I think you’ll like. 🙂 Check it all out:

New Features

There’s a new “Breeze Twilight” global theme with a dark appearance for Plasma and a light appearance for apps (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.21):

There’s now an option to change the first day of the week in the Digital Clock’s calendar popup (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

KWin’s Desktop Grid effect can now be configured to only activate desktops on click, rather than activating both desktops and windows, if you happen to click on a window (Konstantinos Smanis, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole’s “Manage Profiles…” Menu item now takes you to the right place (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3)

Konsole’s context menu now displays the right number of “Open With…” and “Copy Location” menu items in the right place after right-clicking on various different types of things (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3

Middle-clicking on any of the tabs in Okular’s sidebar tab bar no longer closes one of the open documents (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.3)

Dolphin’s background daemon mode no longer triggers session restoration, which should fix an issue with Dolphin always opening at login on Fedora (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.12)

Okular’s command-line --find parameter now works properly if you feed it non-Latin characters (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.3)

Closing an open tab in Okular no longer causes the Ctrl+Tab shortcut used for tab navigation to stop working (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer requires that you manually set an environment variable to make NVIDIA GPUs using the proprietary driver function properly. If this sounds like a big deal, it is! (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.20.2)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you hover the cursor over a Task Manager item to display a window preview when PipeWire is not installed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.2)

Plasma no longer crashes when certain apps do weird things with their PIDs (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

For people who turned on the login sound, it is once again played at login as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

Fixed tons and tons of recent visual regressions in the System Tray: the highlight effect for the active System Tray item is once again large enough to completely fit the item’s icon; tray icons in very thick panels are once again centered in the panel; Multi row/column layouts no longer sometime overlap adjacent Panel widgets; Clicks are no longer eaten by the expander arrow in certain multi-row/column layouts (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20.2)

In a Wayland session, dragging files and icons no longer shows broken, clipped, or pixelated thumbnails (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.2)

The System Settings Users page now lets you apply the same change to multiple profile fields if you want to (Alexander Potashev, Plasma 5.20.2)

Volume and brightness OSDs on the lock screen once again show the correct values (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

In the wallpaper chooser view, the “Get New Plugins…” button no longer sometimes overlaps the combobox next to it (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

Moving the cursor outside of the widget explorer once again makes the selection highlight effect disappear correctly (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

KSysGuard no longer leaks lots of memory when left open for a long period of time (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.3)

Plasma Icon applets that point to locations rather than applications once again work properly (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.3)

In a Plasma Wayland session, the “Sliding Popups” effect used for various panel widgets no longer suffers from minor visual glitches (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.3)

Discover no longer ever automatically opens at login when it was open at logout as this is not useful (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.3)

System Settings’ “Highlight Changed Settings” feature now remembers whether it was on or off when you close and re-open System Settings (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20.3)

Double-clicking on System Settings’ “Highlight Changed Settings” button now toggles it on and then off again as expected, instead of eating the second click and leaving it in an inconsistent state (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20.3)

System Tray items for certain Electron apps that don’t properly set their titles will now at least display something sane for the text (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.3)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you drag something from an XWayland app to a Wayland app (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you drag an icon from Kickoff to Konsole (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

In a Plasma Wayland session, pasting text that was copied inside an XWayland app once again works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

In a Plasma Wayland session, dragging something in Firefox no longer causes the cursor to get stuck displaying a grabby hand forever lol (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.1)

Reduced the amount of CPU resources that KWin used to draw hardware-accelerated cursors (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

KWin no longer tries to use a connected VR headset as another screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

The window minimize animation is no longer sometimes a bit glitchy when using a multi-monitor setup while an app is playing a video on a rotated monitor (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

The KIO library now fully supports preserving extended attributes during common file manipulation operations (Gleb Popov, Frameworks 5.76)

In a Wayland session, KRunner no longer takes up unnecessary CPU resources when visible but it doesn’t look like anything is happening (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.76)

Moving the mouse over different items in the file open/save dialogs while the preview panel is open now causes the preview to always update properly (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.76)

User Interface Improvements

The two ways of maximizing a split view in Konsole now behave identically (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3)

Screenshots taken with Spectacle now appear in the list of recent documents in the Places Panel that’s visible in Dolphin, the file dialogs, and various other pieces of software (Méven Car, Spectacle 20.08.3)

In the System Settings Online Accounts page, errors when connecting to external accounts are now displayed in the UI rather than silently ignored (Nicolas Fella, kaccounts-integration 20.12)

The “New Tab” button on Konsole’s tab bar now has a tooltip (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.12)

Window rules are now allowed to position windows with negative X and Y values, if you really want (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.20.2)

Files and folders on the desktop can now properly be interacted with using a touchscreen, including press-and-hold to emulate a right-click (Steffen Hartlieb, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner search results no longer display uninstalled apps so prominently (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings Audio Volume now has a fancy new layout that’s much simpler and dispenses with the multi-tab view (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21):

The System Settings Window Rules page now supports the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings Task Switcher, Window Behavior and General Behavior pages now fully support the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

When using the setting to open files and folders with double-click, System Settings’ icon view now opens pages with a single-click, not a double-click (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

The context menu for file-based notifications now includes a “Move to Trash” item just in case you suddenly realize you don’t need the file after all (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21):

The bracket matching feature in Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps now matches angle brackets too (Milian Wolff, Frameworks 5.76)

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.

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Last week’s post: https://pointieststick.com/2020/10/24/this-week-in-kde-title/