Most KDE contributors are still recovering from their holiday vacations, but nevertheless the first of my 2020 predictions has been fulfilled: KIO now makes remote locations available to non-KDE apps using FUSE mounts! This brings us to full feature parity with GNOME’s GVFS system and makes it painless to interact with files in remote locations using apps like LibreOffice, Blender, and VLC. Full support will be shipped to users with the Dolphin 20.04 release.

More New Features

• There are now thumbnail previews for cursor files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• Plasma’s amazing notification system gained support for apps to let you reply to messages inline (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The context menu in the System Settings Network Connections page no longer sometimes appears in the wrong place when clicked (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.5)
• The Alt-tilde shortcut to switch between the current app’s open windows now works on Wayland when Num Lock mode is active (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Icons page now correctly highlights the current icon theme when it was installed and activated using Discover, and deleting an icon theme no longer resets the view’s currently-selected icon theme (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
• System Settings no longer shows the dreaded “ambiguous shortcut” dialog when you hit Ctrl+F; the shortcut now works to focus the search field (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• KDE’s GTK theming now respects the GTK2_RC_FILES environment variable (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• File dialogs opened by applications that only supports local files (e.g. Firefox when using the openSUSE patches to show the KDE file dialog) now shows disks and removable media devices in their Places panels (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.66)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when you rename the trash can (Elvis Angelaccio, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

• Elisa’s playlist now shows the full album and artist names in the header area instead of eliding after one line (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
  
• In Elisa, you can now play different songs in the playlist using the keyboard (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0)
• When using plasma-browser-integration, files downloaded using your web browser show up as recent documents in Dolphin, the file dialogs, and the application launcher menu (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Discover now presents app and addon reviews more elegantly (KDE VDG and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Audacity project files and Apple Wallet files now have nice Breeze icons (Kai Uwe Broulik and Carson Black, Frameworks 5.66)

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.

Though KDE contributors are mostly enjoying a well-deserved rest during the holiday season (hence the late post today, sorry about that), the community’s tireless souls have been laboring anyway to bring you new features and bugfixes anyway! Check ’em out:

New Features

• The System Settings Plasma Style page now has a search field and a filtering combobox that can be used to narrow down the main view, just like the one on the Colors page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Notifications page now has an entry for “Other Applications” so that you can choose the notification behavior of poorly-integrated apps that don’t identify themselves properly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The properties dialog for folders now offers you the option to explore the folder in Filelight, if it’s installed (Shubham, Frameworks 5.66):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Elisa’s settings window is no longer implemented as a KCM (a System Settings page), so it no longer inappropriately appears in global searches (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.1)
• Dolphin’s SVN integration plugin now notices and lets you commit newly-added files (Dolphin 20.04.0, Nikolai Krasheninnikov)
• Cursor themes installed with Discover can now be deleted on the System Settings Cursors page (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
• On Wayland, the Widget Explorer is now usable (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

• Gwenview now includes a toolbar button in fullscreen mode to let you easily show or hide the sidebar (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.04.0)
• Spectacle’s configuration window now has a “Defaults” button that lets you reset everything to the default settings (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.04.0):
  
• Elisa’s playlist panel can now be shown and hidden from a button on the main toolbar, and automatically hides itself when the window becomes very narrow. This makes the app quite responsive (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
  
  
  (Try to ignore the horrible flickering; we’ll get that fixed)
• Added explanatory labels for the single-click/double-click settings that help you learn how to select items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.

Features and polish are coming in hot and heavy for Plasma and KDE apps! But have you heard about KDE’s wallpaper contest for Plasma 5.18? We held one of these for Plasma 5.16 and it resulted in the fantastic “Ice Cold” wallpaper, by Santiago Cézar. Now’s your chance to enter a wallpaper for Plasma 5.18, which is an LTS release, so it will be seen by millions of people for years! There are fabulous prizes by sponsor Tuxedo Computers. Check out the rules here: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition

New Features

• Dolphin now lets you include tags in the search criteria (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• When searching in System Settings, the results list now shows the actual matches pages, not just the top-level categories (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The Network Monitor widget can now be configured to show transfer speeds in Bytes (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• It’s now possible to enable and disable Do Not Disturb mode with a keyboard shortcut (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Dolphin’s SVN commit dialog now works again (Nikolai Krasheninnikov, Dolphin 19.12.1)
• Using a mouse wheel to scroll in Dolphin and the file dialogs no longer scrolls way too fast when using a view with large icons (me: Nate Graham and Arjen Hiemstra, Dolphin 19.12.1 and Frameworks 5.66)
• Fixed a regression in the size of the weather widget’s temperature text when using a very short panel that I caused a few weeks ago while trying to make the text size identically match that of the clock widget. Now the issue is fixed and the text sizes really are always identical (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.5)
• When you clear the clipboard contents, its last item is now really actually cleared (Piotr Dabrowski, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When changing the font size, UI elements that dynamically enlarge or shrink themselves in response to font metrics now do so immediately in QML-based apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.66)
• Manually-mounted NFS shares no longer show up twice in the Places Panel in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other apps (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.66)
• Dates throughout KDE software no longer use ambiguous relative terms like “Last Monday” (was it the Monday of this week, or the previous one?); instead they revert to using absolute dates three days in the past or future (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.66)
• In OpenSUSE, using Discover to install an app while there are are available updates no longer silently installs the updates too (Jonathan Kang, latest OpenSUSE PackageKit packaging)

User Interface Improvements

• It’s now obvious which Plasma themes follow your system color scheme (Filip Fila and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18):
  
• The timeout indicator on notification popups is now circular and surrounds the close button (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• There’s now a draggable proxy icon in the “file was downloaded” notification that you can drag to places and do cool stuff with it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Plasma now shows you a notification warning you when a connected Bluetooth device is about to run out of battery power (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Task Manager tooltips now have a highlight effect when you hover over them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Various places throughout Plasma where things can be dragged now display open and closed grabby cursors as appropriate (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The Plasma Networks widget no longer has two nearly-identical menu items in its context menu; everything’s been consolidated into just one (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Notifications that you need to log into the Captive Portal page for a public network no longer become duplicated under certain circumstances, and disappear when you log into the network (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The little downward-pointing arrows in Dolphin’s back and forward buttons are now smaller and no longer cause the buttons to widen, improving the appearance (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.

We’ve got some really big things planned and in progress for Plasma 5.18 and Frameworks, and work proceeds smoothly. None of it is quite done yet, but we did land a number of nice bugfixes and user interface polish for issues that have been irritating people for years…and mere days! Have a look:

New Features

• It’s now possible to configure Do Not Disturb mode to turn on and off with a global keyboard shortcut (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Grouping can now be turned off by default for the Icons-Only Task Manager if you want (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Elisa is now able to work with music collections on external disks (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.1)
• Text file previews no longer have invisible text when using a dark theme (Ilia Kats, Dolphin 20.04)
• It’s now possible to configure scanners with more than one scan source (Anton Arnold, Skanlite 20.04.0)
• Fixed a common System Settings crash triggered by navigating to the Window Decorations page after the Colors page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.5)
• The Plasma Pager widget once again shows windows on other monitors (David Faure, Plasma 5.17.5)
• Icons in the Activities list now look good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.5):
  
• The install buttons on Discover’s app lists no longer overflow their layout after searching for an app when the window is very wide (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Discover now shows nested comments for addons, and correctly reports the total number of comments (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when the information panel tries and fails to fetch information from a broken symlink (Ismail Asensio, Frameworks 5.65.1)
• Discover now installs icon themes successfully (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin and Kate now both use the same shortcuts for their built-in terminal views: F4 to open and close, and Ctrl+Shift+F4 to focus/de-focus (me: Nate Graham, Kate 20.04.0)
• Open/Save dialogs now open with a sensible default size (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• The Kickoff Application Launcher now shows app names first, rather than their subtitles (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• A Task Manager tooltip’s number badge (if present) now aligns perfectly with the close button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The notifications system now shows you an appropriate message when it’s been disabled because something else is providing notifications or there is no notification widget/system tray item (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Night Color page now has a clearer user interface (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Mouse page now has a better default size when opened standalone in its own window (me: Nate graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Task Manager icons now use more different background colors to show their states (Niccolo Venderadi and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.66):
  
• The “Show Desktop” widget in the default panel now always uses a monochrome icon, and looks sharp at any size (Kai Uwe Broulik, and Noah Davis Frameworks 5.66):
  

How You Can Help

Do you like to categorize things? So do I! Then why not try your hand at triaging bugs? KDE’s faithful users file about 25 of them every day, and they all need to be looked at, categorized, moved to the correct products, marked appropriately, closed if the issue has already been fixed–in short, triaged. It’s fun and easy and can be done in 5-minute spurts during boring periods of the day. Triaging bugs is a super helpful way to relieve some of the developers’ burdens if you’re not a developer yourself–developers vastly prefer writing code and fixing bugs to triaging them! For more information, check out https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.

Something cool this way comes… easy Emoji input! Speaking personally, lack of easy Emoji input on Plasma has been irritation for years. But no longer! Plasma now has a built-in Emoji chooser similar to the ones on other competing operating systems. Ours is invoked with the Meta+period keyboard shortcut.

Here it is:

Let’s give a big hand to to Aleix Pol Gonzalez for implementing this! It’ll be available in Plasma 5.18, and in the meantime we’re going to continue to improve its polish, integration, and discoverability.

More New Features

• Dolphin now has an action and keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+F4) to focus and de-focus the terminal panel for super hyper mega productivity (Roman Inflianskas and me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• Gwenview can now import photos both to or from remote locations (Bart De Vries, Gwenview 20.04.0)
• It’s now possible to browse 7Zip archives in Dolphin, Krusader, the file dialogs, and other apps that have a URL navigator (Natsumi Higa, Applications from version 20.04.0)
• It’s now possible to choose what happens when you click in the scroll track in a KDE app: scroll up or down one page, or zoom to the clicked location (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• It’s now possible to make local HTML files open in an app other than your default browser without impacting your ability to open links in that browser. This can be very useful for web development! (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.65)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Okular no longer creates unwanted pop-up notes and dialogs when using a stylus and hovering it close to the screen surface (Tobias Deiminger, Okular 1.9.0)
• Fixed a common crash that could prevent Plasma from starting at all after adding the Printer widget and having multiple pending jobs in the print queue or multiple completed jobs visible under certain circumstances (Albert Astals Cid, Print Manager 19.12.1)
• Menu item text for Kate’s external plugins are now translated (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.1)
• Editing partitions in KDE Partition Manager no longer resets your touchpad settings (!!!) (Andrius Štikonas, Partition Manager 4.0.2)
• Discover’s search field no longer expands beyond the toolbar it’s located in when you paste multi-line text inside it; instead, the newlines are stripped (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Discover’s tasks view no longer has a selected item, so the progress bar never becomes invisible (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• Discover’s screenshot pop-up now has better margins on all sides (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4)
• When choosing a weather station in the weather widget, you no longer need to double-click on an item or click and then hit the return key to make the window’s “Select” button activate (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Disabling MIME-based actions in Klipper now actually disables MIME-based actions in Klipper (Tranter Madi, Plasma 5.17.5)
• When using the Icons view in System Settings, navigating between multiple pages no longer occasionally results in the page title not changing properly (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.16.5)
• The “Search” widget has regained its icon in the Widget Explorer (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.5)
• Fixed keyboard navigation in open/save dialogs such that using the return key to enter a folder when the file viewer is focused no longer unexpectedly saves the file in there (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)
• When you drag a URL from a web browser to Dolphin or the desktop, the resulting icon now has the correct icon (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

• When importing photos with Gwenview, information and errors are now displayed in a more-user-friendly format using inline messages (Bart De Vries, Gwenview 20.04.0)
• Improved the user interface for wired network configuration (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The Plasma Network Manager applet’s Details tab now shows more information about the selected network (Francesco Bonanno, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Drop shadows for Application screenshots in Discover now look better, particularly when using a dark theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Ar you good at web design? KDE has approximately five hundred million (okay, slight exaggeration) websites in need of visual refreshing and technical improvement! Our web team is desperately overworked and in need of help–yours, perhaps. 🙂 Each individual person who joins in will be making a humongous difference! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://community.kde.org/KDE.org

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.

I’ve got big news today. Something major landed: full support for the GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS_ protocol, which hugely improves the user experience for running GTK apps that use client-side decoration headerbars! This includes GNOME apps and an increasing number of 3rd-party GTK apps too. In particular, these apps now display window shadows and have proper resize areas without needing to use a thick border. Here’s how Gedit now looks:

It’s almost native-looking! And it fits right in with the rest of your apps.

I’d like to extend a big thanks for Vlad Zahorodnii who has been working hard on this for months! The feature lands in the upcoming Plasma 5.18 LTS.

But wait, there’s more…

More New Features

• All Plasma widgets can now show or hide the background frame when placed on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
• Plasma Network Manager now supports WPA3 encryption (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When using Dolphin’s built-in search feature, text you enter no longer automatically becomes double-quoted (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• Fixed a bug that could cause the “Open Containing Folder” feature to fail to launch Dolphin after the first time it was used (Elvis Angelaccio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• Konsole now automatically strips out “file://” when pasting local URLs (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.04.0)
• An invisible square that eats clicks no longer appears in the top-left corner of the screen after you suspend compositing and restart KWin while an app that displays a System Tray icon is running (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Album art on the lock screen no longer becomes outrageously gigantic when the media title is really really long (Apurv Jyotirmay, Plasma 5.17.4)
• The weather widget’s weather station configuration window now has a better default size and margins, and the “no weather stations found” text no longer overflows the view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• When using the Task Manager to unminimize a group of minimized windows, the windows are restored stacked in the order they were minimized rather than semi-randomly (Eike Hein, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The cursor no longer unexpectedly changes its appearance when hovering over a GTK app by default (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Network Notifications no longer displays almost-invisible icons when using a dark plasma theme but a light apps color scheme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.18.0)
• This is more of a developer quality-of-life improvement, but compiling the Keyboard KCM in plasma-desktop is now much faster and no longer brings your system to its knees with a recursive forkbomb (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Tab views in QML-based user interfaces now match the background color of the frame when using many non-default color schemes (Filip Fila, Frameworks 5.65)
• Fixed the margins on a variety of standalone dialog and assistant windows (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

• The sidebar toolbar in Discover is now a real toolbar that doesn’t scroll away. My change to do this had to be reverted because it caused problems in some apps, but Marco Martin graciously picked it up and re-implemented it in a better way. Thanks Marco! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Discover’s Task progress sheet now looks like it’s supposed to (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Visible notifications now move out of the way rather than disappearing when the System Tray popup is open in the same area (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The user avatar shown in the Kickoff Application Launcher is now framed in a circle, just like on the lock and login screens (Scott Harvey and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Do you love KDE’s apps? Would you like to help develop for them? I knew you would. 🙂 It’s really fun, and you can have a major impact. Many of KDE’s apps are quite beginner-friendly; among them are Dolphin, Elisa, and Spectacle. See the full list here! These apps’ maintainers as well as KDE’s experienced developers are happy to help and mentor newcomers who want to contribute. For more information on how to get help and who to ask, see https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Start_Here.21

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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.