It’s early in the Plasma 5.20 development cycle and some very nice new features landed this week! Various KDE apps–in particular Okular and Konsole–also got new features. It’s a feature-palooza!

Yes, yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “Why are you writing new features while there’s still so much buggy stuff?” In this case, one of the answers is that new features can often solve bugs. For example the Okular work you’ll read about below resulted in a dozen bug reports getting closed! Sometimes you really can have your cake and eat it, too. 🙂 And of course the Wayland work continues as well…

New Features

Okular’s annotations toolbar has been completely re-done and is now much more discoverable and easier to use! This improvement has been in development for over a year and I’d like to call attention to Simone Gaiarin for his tremendous work here! (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.11.0):

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Konsole now shows you a thumbnail preview for image files that you hover your cursor over by default (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 20.08.0):

Middle-click paste now works on Wayland! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.0)

Changing the screen brightness now smoothly animates the transition rather than jumping from one brightness level to another (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0)

It’s now possible to adjust the balance of individual elements of your speakers (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20):

File choosers displayed by Flatpak apps now implement the ‘choices’ element of the filechooser spec and can therefore be given custom views from the app itself (Michael Weghorn, Plasma 5.20.0)

The Web Browser widget now has a user-configurable zoom setting (Sora Steenvoort, Plasma 5.20.0):

The touchpad cursor speed setting can now be configured on a much more granular basis if desired (Giusy Margarita, Plasma 5.20.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin now shows progress notifications for duplicated files when the duplication takes more than a moment (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.04.2)

When using an alternative input method, Konsole now shows the input method window right below the cursor, where it’s supposed to be (Fuminobu Takeyama, Konsole 20.08.0)

Spectacle no longer gets killed when the notification displayed for the last screenshot disappears (Méven Car, Spectacle 20.08.0)

KRunner’s window now appears in the right place when using a top panel on Wayland (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20)

Folder previews no longer allow the embedded thumbnails to overflow out of the view when they’re very very tall or very very wide (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.08.0)

Dolphin’s free space bar is now correctly sized no matter your font settings (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 20.08.0)

Yakuake no longer unconditionally switches terminals when Shift+Tab is pressed, unless you actually set that as a keyboard shortcut (Maximillian Schiller, Yakuake 20.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s main window has received a visual overhaul, resulting in a new default toolbar layout and hiding the page bar at the bottom of the window by default (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0):

The Properties actions/menu items in Okular and Gwenview are now triggerable using the standard Alt+Return keyboard shortcut, just like in Dolphin (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0 and Gwenview 20.08.0)

Okular now makes it easier to see all of the page sizes in a document with more than one page size (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0):

It’s now possible to explicitly set the size of System Tray icons (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20):

KRunner’s recent documents feature now uses the same data store as everything else with a “recent documents” feature, making its results more consistent and relevant (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20)

The overwrite dialog now makes it clear when the to-be-overwritten file has a file size that differs by less than a kilobyte (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.71)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week a lot of work was put into improving the reliability of the “Get new [thing]” feature integrated into many KDE apps and System Settings pages. Also, several Wayland improvements landed, including subsurface clipping. Finally, a major Dolphin feature request was implemented, allowing the display of on-disk folder sizes! There are also scads of other things, so read the full list and be happy:

New Features

• Dolphin can now optionally compute and display on-disk folder sizes in Details view (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.08.0):
  
• Dolphin service menu plugins that require executing a script or installing a distro package can now be installed right from the “Get new [thing]” window with no manual steps required (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Subsurfaces are now clipped! If this means nothing to you, the simple explanation is that it will reduce many examples of visual glitchiness throughout software run under the KWin window manager (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Elisa and other KDE audio apps now support Audible audiobooks (Stefan Brüns, shared-mime-info 2.0 and KDE Frameworks 5.71)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Dolphin no longer triggers a bunch of pointless “Examining…” messages when connecting to remote servers (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 20.04.1)
• Resolving DNS hostnames for Samba servers is now much faster (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.04.1)
• Dragging files in Dolphin while using a dark theme no longer makes the filename unreadable during the drag (Christian Christiansen, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Percent symbols in Konsole bookmark names are now correctly displayed (Yaroslav Sidlovsky, Konsole, 20.08.0)
• Fixed a very bizarre bug that could cause system tray icons to become invisible under certain circumstances (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Clearing KRunner’s search history using the “Clear History” button in its System Settings page now actually works (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.5)
• The Plasma Networks system tray icon is no longer blank when a WireGuard VPN connection was already active when Plasma was started up (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.6)
• Restoring a Plasma Vault from backup now works properly (Ivan Čukić, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Fixed a crash on Wayland when dragging-and-dropping something from an XWayland-using window (e.g. Firefox) to a native Wayland surface (e.g. Dolphin or Plasma) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Fixed a common crash in the System settings Display Configuration page when configuring displays (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Adjusting the icon size of an icon grid view in a Folder View widget on the panel no longer erroneously applies that size to the list view as well (Alexandre Pereira, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Uninstalling installed 3rd-party Dolphin services now works (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.70)
• Installing and uninstalling content using the “Get New [thing]” dialogs now works much more reliably (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)
• When a thing from the “Get New [thing]” Dialog fails to install or uninstall, its still-installed or not-installed status is now correctly reflected in the user interface (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.71)
• Using the “Get New [thing]” dialogs to update existing items now works and no longer shows “unknown open collaboration service API error” (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)
• The “Get New [thing]” dialogs’ option to show only updatable add-ons now actually does show only updatable add-ons (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)
• The Baloo file indexing service no longer triggers a brief I/O spike when renaming files, and its database now stores information more efficiently and therefore grows more slowly (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 5.71)
• System Settings grid view items are no longer blurry under certain circumstances (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.71)

User Interface Improvements

• “Print” and “Print Preview” are once again next to one another in Okular’s File menu (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.10.1)
• Dolphin’s Services settings page now has a search field at the top to help you quickly find what you’re looking for (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 20.08.0):
  
• The file overwrite dialog now shows an arrow pointing from the source file to the destination file to help you understand what will happen (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.70):
  
• Fixed pixellated icons when using a fractional scale factor in Lokalize, Kig, KDiskFree, KColorSchemeEditor, and Cantor (Matej Mrenica, the next versions of those apps)

How You Can Help

We recently updated our documentation for how to build and run Plasma Mobile locally on your desktop machine: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development#Plasma_Mobile. Plasma Mobile is really amazing and advancing at warp 9 speed, so please do check it out and see what all the fuss is about! More information can be found at https://www.plasma-mobile.org

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Version 20.04.0 of KDE’s apps has been released! Go check it out; there’s amazing stuff in there.

Work proceeds on the Breeze Evolution task for Plasma 5.19. In particular, the System Tray visual overhaul subtask is nearly complete and our tray popups are looking better than ever:

Other work is proceeding nicely as well!

New Features

• Elisa’s top bar is now responsive to the window size and device form factor, so it looks good with a portrait orientation window/device and can scale down to be really tiny (Dami Erny, Elisa 20.08.0):
  
• Gwenview now saves the size of the last-used crop box, so you can quickly crop multiple images to the same size in rapid succession (Mario Aichinger, Gwenview 20.08.0)
• When Okular is asked to open a document that’s already open, it can now be configured to swith to that document instead of opening it again in a new window (Andi Sardina Ramos, Okular 1.11.0)
• The System Settings KWin rules page was rewritten from scratch and now features a much better user interface (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The amazing Plasma Browser Integration system now supports the Brave browser (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The holiday calendar now includes holidays for Taiwan and Nicaragua (Ricky Lindén and Carlos Arguello, Frameworks 5.70)
• KRunner can now convert to and from Imperial Gallons and U.S. Pints (Felix Riiga, Frameworks 5.70)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The folder View popup dialog is once again wide enough to show three columns of icons (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.5):
  
• Fixed several memory leaks in Gwenview (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Gwenview 20.08.0)
• The menu items for “Encrypt File” and “View Decrypted File” in Dolphin when kGPG is installed now use more semantically-correct icons that are now legible when using a dark color scheme (me: Nate Graham, kGPG 20.08.0)
• Searching on the Kickoff Application Launcher works again when the cursor is positioned below the tab bar (Tranter Madi, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Full screen screenshots taken on High DPI systems using Wayland now have the correct resolution (Méven Car, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The OSD to choose what happens when you plug in an external monitor is now centered on Wayland (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.19.0)
• After applying a Global Theme, the correct Plasma style, widget style, and splash screen are now selected in their respective pages (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Inline messages that include buttons in Kirigami apps no longer put the buttons in an overflow menu when there’s plenty of space to display them inline (Xuetian Weng, Frameworks 5.70):
  
• The Breeze icon for VSCode is once again visible (Guo Yunhe, Frameworks 5.70)
• Icons throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps now look better on high DPi multi-monitor setups (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.70)

User Interface Improvements

• It’s now additionally possible to navigate from Dolphin’s search field to the results view by pressing the down arrow key (Shlomi Fish, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• The Standard Shortcuts System Settings page window now has a sane default size when opened standalone in its own window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.5)
• The Weather applet’s weather station chooser window now has a clearer user interface (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• It’s now more feasible to position your notification pop-ups on the top or bottom center because when located there, they are now wider and have less vertical spacing, so they don’t intrude into the center of the screen as much (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The size of the default fixed-width font has been raised from 9 to 10, to match the size of the default non-fixed-width font (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The mount dialog for Plasma Vaults now includes the vault’s name in the titlebar (Konstantinos Smanis, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The Bluetooth applet now displays a nicer tooltip when only a single device is connected (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The latitude and longitude displayed in the System Settings Night Color page no longer display a pointlessly large number of digits after the decimal point (Shubham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• When using KDE software in Polish, the translation for “Cancel” is now “Anuluj” (Łukasz Wojniłowicz, the next released versions of all KDE software)
• Dolphin and the file dialogs now use the same shortcuts for their “show/hide hidden files” actions such that changing the shortcut in one place changes it for the other too (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.70 and Dolphin 20.08.0)

How You Can Help

Just keep being awesome, and rest when you need it. These are hard times. Don’t beat yourself up for not doing more; it’s enough. We’ll get through it.

Three main topics will hold the floor today: Dolphin and other file management stuff, Plasma polish, and Wayland–we’re making a bit of a push on Wayland stuff so you should see more Wayland fixes going forward! For all three, we’re concentrating on fixing longstanding issues. There’s more too, of course!

Also, as you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m going to try out sending these posts on Saturday morning Europe time, instead of Sunday. Hopefully it should be a nice way to start your weekend. 🙂

New Features

• Thumbnail previews can now be shown for files and folders on encrypted filesystems such as Plasma Vaults; this is done securely by storing the cached thumbnails on the filesystem itself, or falling back to generating them but not storing cached versions anywhere if necessary (Marcin Gurtowski, Frameworks 5.70 and Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Changing the color scheme in System Settings now changes the colors for running GTK3 apps immediately, without you having to restart them (Carson Black and Mihkail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• It’s now possible to set non-integer font sizes on the System Settings Fonts page (e.g. 10.5pt Noto Sans) (Ahmad Samir, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Various KDE apps now have basic support for viewing images in the .xcf file format used by the GIMP app (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Frameworks 5.70)
• KRunner’s currency converter now has support for the Icelandic Krona (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Frameworks 5.70)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Fixed a common Dolphin crash when using Qt 5.14.2 (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Dolphin 20.04.0)
• When Spectacle’s is configured to auto-save images to a subfolder, it’s now possible to drag-and-drop them from the main window (Franz Baumgärtner, Spectacle 20.04.0)
• Fixed a rendering glitch with certain kinds of .djvu files at high zoom levels in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.04.0)
• Attempting to install Dolphin services that are distributed in the form of .deb/.rpm packages now delegates the installation to another tool capable of handling them (typically Discover) and therefore now works (Alex Lohnau, Dolphin 20.04.0)
• Dolphin now shows sensible text in its titlebar while searching for files and using the “show full paths in titlebar” setting (Antonio Prcela, Dolphin 20.04.0)
• When Konsole is opened in Background Mode, it now receives keyboard focus automatically without needing to click on it (Anton Karmanov, Konsole 20.04.0)
• Playing or enqueuing a folder of music from your filesystem now plays or enqueues all the contents of that folder plus its subfolders, not just the top-level folder (Graham Littlewood, Elisa 20.08.0)
• Fixed a memory leak in Dolphin when hovering over the “activities…” item in the context menu (Alexander Kandaurov, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Fixed a bug that was making the system’s notification sounds muted by default and not controllable from System Settings without first adjusting the volume once using the 3rd-party Pavucontrol app (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Logging out on Wayland no longer crashes KWin and dumps you at a black screen (I was sure we’d fixed this before, but if so, now we’ve fixed it again!) (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Plasma Vaults no longer crashes when you cancel the mount dialog after it fails to mount a vault due to the mount location not being empty (Ivan Čukić, Plasma 5.18.5)
• Fixed various crashes and UI issues in the DrKonqi crash reporter window on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.5)
• GTK2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape no longer have weird internally mismatched colors when using a non-default color scheme; instead, they don’t even bother to try to respect the color scheme as it isn’t really possible given the way that GTK2 works (Carson Black, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Removed the “Resolution Independent” cursor size setting which never worked properly. This will fix some–but not all–of the recent cursor size problems that people have been experiencing. Other fixes are still pending (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.19.0)
• KRunner’s window no longer appears invisibly under keep-above windows on Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The “Identify Displays” feature now works on Wayland (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Comboboxes displaying icons now display them correctly when using a High DPI scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The Baloo file indexing service now uses fewer system resources–in particular disk I/O–when the system is in use by the user (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 5.70)
• Fixed a recent regression in Kirigami OverlaySheets–clicking inside the sheet no longer automatically closes it (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.70)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s services list is now sorted alphabetically (me: Nate Graham and Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows useful information for the Trash (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.70 and Dolphin 20.8.0):
  
• It’s now more difficult to accidentally delete your panels and panel widgets because the “Remove Panel” button is once again hidden behind the “More Settings…” menu” and all of the remove buttons are located in their menus far away from the mouse pointer (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The Media Player applet has received a visual refresh (Carson Black and Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• Various applets with toolbars–starting with the Bluetooth one–now have a merged toolbar/titlebar look in the System Tray (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The various System Tray applets that use the paradigm of a list item that expands when clicked to reveal more options now all use the same backend UI code, making them touch-friendly and behave in a more consistent and less buggy manner (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• Combobox pop-ups in QML-based software can now be closed by clicking in empty areas of the window, just like QWidgets Comboboxes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.70)

How You Can Help

Version 20.04 of the apps using KDE’s release service–such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Konsole, Spectacle and Elisa–is going to be released soon! Once it’s released, please upgrade and submit bug reports so we can get the issues you find fixed as soon as possible–hopefully by 20.04.1. If your distro features “unstable” or “pre-release” versions, feel free to try out the new apps bundle a week early. It’s a big help!

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.

Some very nice performance fixes landed this week, which should substantially boost move and copy speeds for local transfers and transfers to and from Samba shares in particular. But that’s not all, and there’s more on the menu…

New Features

• Dolphin now displays thumbnails for .3mf files (David Edmundson, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• It’s now possible to configure the visibility of volume-related OSDs in a much more granular way (Sebastian Goth, Plasma 5.19.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Transferring large files to or from Samba shares is now between 50% and 95% faster (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• It’s once again possible to create more than one row of virtual desktops in the System Settings Virtual Desktops page (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.18.4)
• Fixed a possible security hole that could allow executable .desktop files to be executed with no confirmation from the Kicker/Kickoff/Application Dashboard launchers after they had been edited or run once before (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.4)
• The wallpaper settings view no longer shows black rectangles instead of previews until the view is scrolled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.4)
• Dragging-and-dropping items from KRunner now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.5)
• KInfoCenter now shows the right OpenGL information for NVIDIA Optimus setups (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.5)
• When the System Tray pop-up is pinned open and a clipboard history item is clicked to put it on the clipboard, the applet now stays open until manually closed (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The Digital Clock’s calendar popup now shows events for the current day correctly the first time you open it (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Installing new Task Switchers from the “Get new Task Switchers” button on the applicable System Settings page no longer causes an unnecessary “save or discard changes?” prompt when navigating away from the page (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Move and copy speed throughout KDE software is generally faster, especially for small files (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.69
• When multiple users on a multi-user system mount the same Samba share, it now remains visible to all of them in Dolphin’s Places panel (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.69)
• In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, the list of available versions of the thing you’re trying to downloaded is now scrollable when it’s really really humongous (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.69)
• In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, links to external URLs now show tooltips when hovered and no longer show any dead links (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.69):
  

User Interface Improvements

• When dragging a file in Dolphin, the cursor changes into grabby hand by default rather than the “copying” cursor (Tranter Madi, Dolphin 20.08.0)
• Konsole’s default Ctrl+Shift+L shortcut for “Detach current tab” has been removed, so it’s no longer so easy to accidentally detach the current tab when what you meant to do was clear the display using Ctrl+Shift+K (Edward Kigwana, Konsole 20.08.0)
• Notifications have received some visual refinement and now have a defined header area holding the buttons and the name of the app that sent the notification (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• The System Settings File Search page now allows you to determine whether or not to index individual paths and features a clearer UI for doing so (Stefan Brüns and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0):
  
• GTK apps run in Plasma now always default to using the Breeze cursor theme and don’t emit horrific beeps that make you want to throw your computer out the window anymore (Carson Black, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The list of Task Switcher styles in the System Settings Task Switcher page are now listed in alphabetical order rather than semi-randomly (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Breeze icons that depict documents now consistently put the corner fold in the top-right corner (David Hurka, Frameworks 5.69)
• The Breeze find-location icon is now much better (David Hurka, Frameworks 5.69):
  
• Keyboard navigation in save dialogs is now improved: while the file view is focused, hitting the return/enter key while a folder is selected will enter that folder instead of saving inside it and closing the dialog (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.69)

How You Can Help

In Plasma 5.19, we are making a push on our Breeze Theme Evolution work. It’s proceeding, but would go faster with your help! There are tons and tons of mockups in the linked task and its child tasks, and what we really need at this point is people willing to help implement them. QML skills are helpful, and C++ is also useful for the needed work on the Breeze theme itself. If this sounds interesting to you, don’t be shy, step right up! Head over to the VDG channel to find out how you can get involved and coordinate work.

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.