I know I say this a lot… but it’s been yet another big week for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! We also have major features in development–one of which I think will be very popular and I hope to be able to announce it next week. Until then, enjoy this week’s assortment:

New Features

• KRunner can now convert fractional units (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The “move your cursor with the keyboard” accessibility feature that got lost with the Libinput mouse driver support is now back (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• KWin Maximize and Size & Position rules now work on Wayland (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• There’s now a page in System Settings that shows basic information about your system–for more info, open the KInfoCenter app (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• KDE apps with configurable toolbars now allow you to add expanding spacers, which, for example, permit buttons to be centered or stick to the right side of the toolbar (Felix Ernst, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KRunner’s dictionary plugin now actually works (though it still needs UI work and a fixed icon) (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• It’s now possible to type a number in the spinbox on the System Settings Virtual Desktops page (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When another screen is plugged in, it is now extended or mirrored (as appropriate) by default, and the chooser OSD no longer pointlessly appears on login for already-plugged-in screens (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• List items on the System Settings Desktop Effects and Virtual Desktops pages no longer overflow the bounds of their frames (David Redondo, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• When activating a new profile, Konsole once again opens a new tab with the specified profile instead of applying it to the current tab. A lot of people complained about this change, so it has been reverted! (Kurt Hindenburg, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Dolphin’s embedded Konsole terminal panel now changes the active directory as expected when it’s running a process and the user navigates to another location in the file view (Andrey Yashkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Dolphin’s name grouping feature now works with Cyrillic characters (Andrey Yashkin, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• When opening a background tab in Dolphin and then switching to it, focus is now on the file view rather than the URL bar (Andrey Yashkin, Dolphin 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The number inside the notification count in the System Tray now looks better (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.16.5):
  
• The System Settings Boot Splash page now has a modernized look and feel, which also fixes various bugs: it now shows thumbnails, correctly highlights the active theme, and looks good when using a fractional scale factor (Björn Feber and Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings Desktop Effects page has received a user interface overhaul, fixing various bugs such as the scrollbar overlapping the buttons and inconsistent selection and section header appearance (David Redondo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Info Center’s Energy page now uses the more accurate term “Remaining energy” to express how much power is left in your battery (Alois Wohlschlager, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Kickoff’s “Remove from Favorites” context menu item now uses a more appropriate icon (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The tab bars in the System Settings Audio Volume and Window Decorations pages now look better with the Breeze theme (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK3 apps now slightly depress when clicked, matching their equivalents in Qt and KDE apps (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Icons in the advanced permissions editor now come from your active icon theme, and therefore look good in high DPI mode and with all color schemes (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.62):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Here’s week 81 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! And boy is there some delicious stuff today. In addition to new features and bugfixes, we’ve got a modernized look and feel for our settings windows to show off:

Doesn’t it look really good!? This design is months in the making, and it took quite a bit of work to pull it off. I’d like to thank Marco Martin, Filip Fila, and the rest of the KDE VDG team for making it happen. This is the first of several user interface changes we’re hoping to land in the Plasma 5.17 timeframe, and I hope you’ll like them!

In the meantime, look at all the other cool stuff that got done this week:

New Features

• Image slideshow wallpapers now permit you to set the sort order, rather than always being random (David Redondo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Night Color feature now has a “Manual” mode that allows you to turn it on or off at will (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The feature that syncs user settings to the SDDM login screen now syncs the screen DPI and NumLock key status as well (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Opening the System Settings Fonts page no longer unexpectedly alters the font anti-aliasing settings (Antonio Rojas, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When using the Application Dashboard, opening apps with a touch on the touchscreen now works reliably again (Luca Carlon, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• KRunner is now faster to return results, and entries no longer jump around once you’ve got something selected (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• KIO’s FTP connection feature is now more tolerant of broken FTP server implementations (Enes Selim, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• List items in QML-based software that displays inline actions on hover now have better spacing for the items, and take into account whether or not the view’s scrollbar is visible (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Media apps using a sandboxing technology like FireJail can now be controlled through Plasma’s Media Player widget as expected (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.61)

User Interface Improvements

• The Networks widget’s Airplane Mode setting now persists across reboots, powers off Bluetooth as well, and no longer appears at all on systems without any wireless hardware (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Code that controls widget positioning on the Desktop has been completely rewritten, which should improve remembering widget locations, and also now widget resize handles and icons increase in size when interacted with via touch (Marco Martin, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
• Discover’s sidebar is now full of pretty icons! (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings Fonts page now informs you that apps may need to be restarted before changes are applied with an inline message rather than an annoying dialog box (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The new Unsplash Wallpapers Picture of the Day plugin now lets you select which category you want — or all of them! (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Audio Volume widget now uses the more user-friendly term “Recording devices” rather than “capture devices” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The spinning busy indicator visible in Discover now spins more slowly (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Improvements to Okular’s Stamp annotation tool: the configuration dialog is now more obvious about the fact that it supports user-specified images, and it shows a preview of your custom image; non-square stamps aren’t resized to be square; and finally it now warns you that it’s an experimental feature which may not work properly in all cases (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.9.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Somehow we’ve gone through 80 weeks of progress reports for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! Does that seem like a lot to you? Because it seems like a lot to me. Speaking of a lot, features are now pouring in for KDE’s Plasma 5.17 release, as well as Applications 19.08. Even more is lined up for Applications 19.12 too, which promises to be quite a release. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for you:

New Features

• It’s now possible to see a network’s QR code for easy sharing with others (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• It’s now possible to sync user settings for fonts, cursors, color schemes, etc. to the SDDM login screen, ensuring a unified look and feel from boot to shutdown (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• KRunner’s unit conversion abilities now include binary sizes like Megabytes and Gibibytes (Jonathan Rubenstein, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• Okular now has an “Open Containing Folder” feature, so for example you can easily find the on-disk location of PDFs downloaded from the internet (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.8.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• It’s once again easily possible to close the Look And Feel preview window on systems using Qt 5.13 (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Fixed a recent regression that prevented documents located on remote servers from being opened using KIO’s command-line tools when the URL for the document contained a port number (Gleb Popov, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Plasma no longer attempts to auto-mount already-mounted devices under certain circumstances (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Comboboxes in QML-based software now close their open pop-ups when clicking on the combobox itself (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• Spinboxes in QML-based software now display text that’s anti-aliased correctly and looks good with a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• When dragging a rubber-band-selection in Dolphin, the selection box now goes away as expected after right-clicking (Jackson Reed McNeill, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Okular’s page borders now look good in High DPI mode (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The spinning busy indicator animation now has arrows that point in the same direction as the rotation (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
  
• Kate’s “switch input mode” keyboard shortcut is now bound to Ctrl+Alt+V by default, which makes it possible to use the standard Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to paste text into Kate’s embedded terminal (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• When spectacle has minimized itself during a timed screenshot, if you un-minimize it, the “Take a new Screenshot” button will have turned into a cancel button, which displays an inline progress bar showing how much time is left before the screenshot is taken (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

After a somewhat light week, we’ve back with week 79 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and there’s a ton of cool stuff for you!

New Features

• The popular Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin can now pull images from Unsplash.com (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps like KDevelop can now insert a non-indented newline with the ctrl + enter/return keystroke (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The kstart5 command (e.g. kstart5 dolphin) now works on Wayland (Igor Kovalenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The ubiquitous translucent blur effect no longer looks too dark with certain Intel graphics hardware (Fredrik Höglund, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The System Settings Fonts page’s “Force Fonts DPI” setting now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• Eliminated screen flickering at boot-up when using high DPI scaling (Aleix pol Gonzales, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The “Go to line” feature in kate and other text editors that use the KTextEditor framework once again always centers the zoomed-to line, even if it’s at the end of the document (Christoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
• The “collapse all” icons used in many apps now correctly change their colors when using a dark theme (Natsumi Higa, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• Gwenview now correctly loads and displays files located on remote locations accessed using KIO (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
• Fixed an issue causing Konsole to randomly scroll down at times, especially for i3 users (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Konsole no longer eats the shift+backtab keystroke, so for example it’s once again possible to see history when using default zsh keybindings (and you can fix it for yourself right now by removing the Shift+Tab shortcut for “Next View Container” in Settings → Configure shortcuts) (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again sorts items by recency of use and pre-selects the top item (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 19.08.0)
• Kate’s “recent documents” feature now works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settingsnow works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settings (Ahmad Samir, Kate 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• On Wayland, the user-configured keyboard repeat rate is now respected (Sam Edwards, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
• When a mounted device is ejected using the Device Notifier, the message telling you it’s safe to unplug an unmounted device now remains visible for a little while instead of immediately disappearing (Stefan Brüns, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When there are no speakers or other audio output devices, Plasma now represents this by actually telling you that instead of creating a fake “Dummy output” device that can’t be interacted with (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is now persistent for greater visibility, and no longer clutters up your notification history after you’ve dismissed it or installed the updates (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s now possible to set a global keyboard shortcut to turn Night Color on or off (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Konsole’s settings window has received a user interface overhaul, and now follows the common FormLayout style (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• Spectacle’s “on click” trigger now works on Wayland (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)
• Yakuake now offers blurred backgrounds, just like Konsole (Owen Chia, Yakuake 3.0.6)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

It’s time for week 78 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! This week I think people have been taking a breather following a super intense sprint, and some are even on vacation–myself included. So this week’s report is going to ba a bit light, but it’s still got a few cool goodies!

New Features

• It’s now possible to assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen (Martin Blumenstingl, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• In Konsole’s new tiled split mode, it’s now possible to re-arrange views by drag-and-drop! (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• The System Settings Energy Saving page now offers an option to hibernate after a period of sleep, when supported by the system (Alejandro Valdes, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When adding a folder to the Places panel that has been given a custom icon, its Places panel entry now correctly displays that custom icon (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• When deleting multiple files, the notification that tracks its progress now reports the total number of files correctly (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

User Interface Improvements

• Added support for filtering out old Plasma 4 themes from the store.kde.org downloader (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• Dolphin’s sort order chooser now uses human-readable text (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 19.08.0):
  
• When taking a time-delayed screenshot, Spectacle now displays the remaining time before the screenshot is taken in its window title, which is visible in its Task Manager item (Felix Ernst, Spectacle 19.08.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

We’re up to week 77 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! This week’s report encompasses the latter half of the Usability & Productivity sprint. Quite a lot of great work got done, and two features I’m particularly excited about are in progress with patches submitted and under review: image annotation support in Spectacle, and customizable sort ordering for wallpaper slideshows. These are not done yet, but should be soon! Meanwhile, check out what’s already landed:

New Features

• When trying to access a network with a captive portal (e.g. an airport or hotel wifi network that requires you to log in or click a “yes I accept the terms of use bla bla bla” button), an icon in the system tray allows you to access it again in case you miss the page the first time around (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel can now optionally auto-play media files; the setting is in the Information Panel’s context menu (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.08.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Flatpak and Snap apps with mismatching app IDs now show up properly in the task manager (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Job status notifications once again appear for people using Latte Dock (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Notification pop-ups no longer sometimes become collapsed or fly in from the wrong location when there’s an unpleasant flood of notifications (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Paused job notifications no longer show an inaccurate “time remaining” indicator (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Fixed a crash on Wayland when using the default “Smart” window placement strategy (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• The System Settings Look and Feel and Splash Screen pages now consume much less memory (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Plasma no longer freezes at a black screen when logging out of a Wayland session (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• Plasma’s KWin window manager no longer gobbles up all available memory when using a non-Breeze window decoration theme on Wayland (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• It’s now possible for the screen to automatically lock itself while a KWin effect is active (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Apps like Kate and KDevelop that use the KTextEditor framework now continue to spell-check documents for which spell-checking is turned on after they have been reloaded after being changed on disk, and scroll down when dragging something to the bottom of the view at the same speed as they scroll up when dragging it to the top (Ahmad Samir and Axel Kittenberger, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• When Spectacle is used to save an image with a space in its filename and then quit itself automatically, the link in the notification generated by this action now works (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The Plasma notification history no longer includes apps that don’t properly configure their notifications, preventing notification spam (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• The Notifications history now displays the configure and clear buttons in the same order on top as they appear within individual notifications (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Notifications that appear within one second of another notification that has identical content are now automatically suppressed, preventing notification spam from misbehaving software (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
• The System Settings Colors page now displays color schemes’ titlebar colors too, so for example you can distinguish color schemes that vary only in their titlebar colors (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Pages in Info Center now all have the same sized titles (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Plasma network manager widget no longer futilely tries to keep scanning for wifi networks even when wifi is disabled (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Audio Volume’s settings window now accurately describes what the feedback options do (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings User Manager page no longer encourages you to enter an incorrect short name (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Places Panel in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other apps no longer shows a “Root” item by default. Don’t worry, you can still get to / with one click using the Places panel, just click on its corresponding Devices entry, which gets a special icon to make it easy to pick out. Relatedly, the Places Panel now always shows a root device when running from a live ISO image (Méven Car and Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• The sharing feature’s job dialog is now even more polished, having a better default size and more consistent bottom buttons (Nicolas Fella and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• It’s now possible to disable Dolphin’s unreleased “open externally-opened folders in new tabs” feature (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Everything in Dolphin’s main window now has “What’s this?” text (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Okular’s annotation configuration dialogs now look better (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.8.0):
  

Pretty freakin’ sweet, huh?! It was a great development sprint and I’m really happy with how it went. I’ll be writing another more in-depth article about it, so stay tuned.

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Week 76 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! This week’s progress report includes the first several days of the Usability & Productivity sprint, and as such, it’s absolutely overflowing with cool stuff!

New Features

• The previously Wayland-only Night Color feature will soon be available on X11 too! (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Spectacle now displays and allow you to configure the shortcuts used to invoke it from its settings window (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0):
  
• When doing a timed screenshot capture, Spectacle now displays feedback in its Task Manager button showing how long before the screenshot is taken (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0):
  
• Gwenview now has a “Share” menu that allows sending images to various places, as in other KDE apps like Spectacle, Dolphin, and Okular (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 19.08.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KRunner’s calculator runner once again works properly when the AppStream runner is enabled (Matthias Klumpp, AppStream 0.12.7 – go bug your distros to upgrade!)
• Using KRunner to put the computer to sleep now works again; sorry for breaking this! (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)
• System Settings no longer crashes when you navigate to the System Settings Touchpad settings page but there’s no touchpad connected (Bastian Beischer, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Fixed a crash affecting the daemon backing the System Settings Touchpad page (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Critically low battery notifications are now sent again (Anthony Fieroni, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Spectacle’s “quit after copy to clipboard” feature now really truly actually finally works (David Redondo and David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• It’s now possible to Pin GIMP 2.10 to the Task manager because we worked around a bug in GIMP (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• The Calculator widget now shows a pop-up of the correct size when in the panel (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.2):
  
• The Kickoff Application Launcher once again pre-selects the top search result (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.16.2)
• Using the arrow keys to move KSysGuard’s “Priority” slider now moves it in the correct direction (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Fixed a crash when using certain GTK-based apps with the Breeze GTK theme (Valerii Zapod, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Fixed a case where the splash screen could freeze on login with certain multi-screen setups (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The icons in a yellow sticky note widget are now legible when using a dark theme (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Energy Saving page now looks nicer, and you can open it from the Battery widget’s context menu (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Disk Quota widget now shows an icon in the system tray, and that icon shows up with a dark theme (Nicolas Fella and Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.17.0 and Frameworks 5.60)
• KDE applications no longer set invalid modification times on copied files under certain circumstances (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• KRunner is now faster to return results (Fabian Vogt, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• Kirigami list items with inline buttons are now tall enough to fully contain the buttons (David Redondo, KDE Frameworks 5.60):
  
• ToolButtons in Kirigami-based apps that are currently displaying tooltips now hide their tooltips when clicked (Carson Black, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• The list of printers is now sorted case-insensitively (Igor Poboiko, KDE Applications 19.04.3)
• Konsole no longer crashes when copying highlighted text under certain circumstances (David Hallas, Konsole 19.08.0)
• Fixed some bugs in Dolphin’s unreleased “open new folders as new tabs” feature: it’s once again possible to manually open new Dolphin instances, and the “Open Containing Folder” feature in many KDE apps now works again (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Okular’s presentation mode marker tool now looks crisp and smooth when in High DPI mode (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.0)

User Interface Improvements

• It’s now possible to perform calculation and unit conversion from the Dashboard and Kickoff Application Launcher (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.2):
  
• The Task Manager’s context menu now consistently uses separate “Pin to Task manager” and “Unpin from Task Manager” menu entries instead of sometimes using a checkbox (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The splash screen’s fade-to-the-desktop animation is now faster (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s once again possible to configure the Present Windows effect to close windows when middle-clicked (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When creating new files or folders, feedback and error messages are now shown inline as you type rather than in modal dialog boxes after you’re done (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• The System Settings “Joystick” page is now called “Game Controller” and uses an appropriate icon (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.17.0 and Frameworks 5.60):
  
• The “Send to” window for sharing plugins (e.g. KDE Connect and Bluetooth) now looks much better and also no longer sends an error notification if you cancel the share action in the middle (Nicolas Fella, KDE Frameworks 5.60):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Week 75 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! It’s a little lighter than usual because we’re all feverishly preparing for the dual Plasma and Usability & Productivity sprints next week in Valencia, Spain. I’ll be there, as well as the whole Plasma team, a bunch of VDG people, and a number of folks who have stepped up to work on apps for the U&P initiative. Sprints like these promise the kind of face-to-face contact needed for big projects, and should be a fantastically awesome and productive time! I’d like to offer a special thanks to Slimbook (makers of the KDE Slimbook II laptop) for hosting the sprint!

Anyway, here’s the week’s report:

New Features

• When using multiple screens, it’s now possible to configure whether the settings for a particular screen apply to that screen in every arrangement that includes that screen, or only in the current screen arrangement (Roman Gilg, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The Baloo file indexing service now notices when extended attributes on folders change, no longer does unnecessary work when an indexed folder is renamed, is faster to index un-indexed files, is even lighter when run on a laptop on battery power, and terminates its indexer processes when stopped or disabled, and (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• The screen locker now works harder to lock the screen on X11 when something has grabbed keyboard focus (e.g. when a context menu is open) (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Settings for font rendering are now saved and retrieved properly in all circumstances (Bhushan Shah, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)
• There is no longer a one-pixel pap between the panel and application windows when using certain 3rd-party Plasma themes with Qt 5.13 (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)

User Interface Improvements

• The session and keyboard chooser menus on the SDDM login screen are now visually consistent with everything else (Carson Black, Plasma 5.16.1):
  
• Discover no longer shows huge unnecessary horizontal padding for screenshots on Plasma and apps addons (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)
• The System Settings Night Color page received now has a better layout (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Konsole’s settings window has been modernized and given a user interface overhaul (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
  
• Text in Dolphin’s information panel is now mouse-selectable and copyable (Gabriel Felipe Huwe, Dolphin 19.08.0)
• Improved High DPI support in Yakuake (Matthieu Gras, Yakuake 3.0.6)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Week 74 in Usability & Productivity initiative is here!

Now that Plasma 5.16 is frozen and almost out the door, we’ve started turning our attentions to Plasma 5.17. One of the big features I’m pushing on is a visual evolution of the Breeze theme. The first component just landed: KWin-generated window borders are now off by default for the Breeze theme! Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to aim for a single pixel to to resize windows; there are virtual resize areas just the same size as the old window borders so the behavior is unchanged. It also has no effect on other themes, many of which have big, beautiful borders that stand out as part of the theme’s design. But Breeze is a minimalistic theme, and this is the first step towards modernizing the look and feel of KDE apps. We think you’re really going to love the final result!

In the meantime, take a look at all the other cool stuff that got done this week by KDE’s awesome contributors:

New Features

• The Open/Save dialogs’ toolbar now has buttons to switch between Dolphin-style view modes – icons, Compact, and Details (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.60):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The Trashcan and Icon widgets now have shadows behind their text labels that match other shadows for files and folders on the desktop (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.12.9)
• More notifications bugfixes: the circled number in the system tray is now more centered (though not perfectly centered; still working on that), and notifications with images now have better spacing between the text and the image (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Artwork in the Media Player widget no longer overflows from its bounds under certain circumstances (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The DrKonqi bug reporting wizard no longer always has the “report Bug” button disabled in certain circumstances (Daniel Vrátil, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The SDDM login screen theme now looks good by default on up to 5K displays, while simultaneously using a little less memory for everyone else (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When switching color schemes, all KDE apps’ user interface controls now change their colors without having to quit and re-open them (Sebastian Kügler, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)
• The Network widget’s System Tray popup can now be closed using the Escape key after having opened the Search bar at least once (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Plasma 5.16.1)
• Maximized windows on one screen of a multi-screen setup are no longer resizable by their edges that touch any other screen (Hugo Pereira Da Costa, KDE Plasma 5.17.0
• Plugging in an external keyboard no longer resets the list of keyboard layouts when the ~/.config/kxkbrc file is missing (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.17.0
• The Baloo file indexing service now consumes fewer resources on laptops using battery power, no longer crashes when it encounters a file that was deleted between file scanning and indexing, and indexes files more quickly by not unnecessarily looking up files mimetypes until needed and avoiding expensive regular expression matching when there’s an exact text match and matching against a single combined regular expression rather than a ton of individual ones (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• Gwenview now correctly displays thumbnails created with Sony cameras (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
• Spectacle now displays the correct filename and location in the save dialog the first time you use it to save an image (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The “Show Desktop” and “Minimize all” widgets now use a monochrome icon in the panel, matching all other default icons (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Calculator widget’s button text now gets bigger and smaller according to the widget’s size (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Task Manager’s middle-click behaviors now match those of the Windows 10 version: middle-clicking on an open app’s Task opens a new instance, while middle-clicking on its thumbnail will close that instance (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The System Settings SDDM login screen page’s Advanced tab has been redesigned for greater usability and conformance with the common style (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Help > Donate menu item now shows local currency icons (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• The file open/save dialog now saves any visual changes you made to the current view mode when you switch to another view mode (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
• Okular’s toolbar selection mode button now displays the Text Selection tool by default, opens its pop-up when you click on its arrow, and uses consistent naming for all items (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.8.0):
  
• Okular’s Text Selection tool now uses the same icon in all places where it appears (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.60 and Okular 1.8.0)
• Okular’s Browse tool now displays the correct “grabby hand” icon (Noah Davis, Okular 1.8.0):
  
• The Samba share creation window now has a button to display the Samba share monitor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.