Week 51 of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! Most people are still out on vacation these days, so like last week it’s a bit lighter than usual. That didn’t stop the rest of us though! Check out what we did:

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When using the KDE file dialog from a GTK app via the XDG portal, the “Automatically select extension” option no longer puts a raw shell glob at the end of the filename (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• KWin no longer occasionally crashes when disabling compositing, often when launching a video game (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Non-clickable list items in Discover’s Tasks view no longer inappropriately look clickable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Changed the default sort order for the “Get New [stuff]” dialog to “Most Downloads”, which produces more relevant results than Rating did because it takes into account recency (Björn Feber, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Fixed one of the ways that Dolphin could crash when renaming a directory (Jaime Torres Amate, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• When using Konsole’s “Enable Alternate Screen buffer scrolling” option to permit using the scroll wheel or two-finger touchpad gesture to scroll in command-line programs like less, now the behavior keeps working after issuing a reset command (Ahmad Samir, KDE Applications 18.12.1)

User Interface Improvements

• When choosing new wallpaper images using the “Add Image” button, it’s now possible to add multiple images at a time (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Python bytecode files now get their own icons (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• Konsole tabs now only show icons on tabs when using a profile that has a customized icon (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Kate now has a menu entry for enabling and disabling Static Word Wrap, so you can easily toggle it on and off on a per-document basis without having to change the global default setting (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Holy moley, there are 50 of these Usability & Productivity reports?! Time sure flies when you’re having fun!

Speaking of having fun, this week is going to be a bit light what with the run-up to Christmas. Folks are spending some time with their families and recharging batteries!

Nevertheless, it was quite a week for some of the core KDE applications, which received a number of nice improvements and new features. More are on the way too, and the upcoming KDE Applications 19.04 release promises to be packed with much-requested goodies!

New Features

• Okular’s print dialog now has scaling options (Oliver Sander, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Improved the speed with which HTTP and HTTPS links are opened in a browser when the browser has been set as the default browser in ~/.config/mimeapps.list but not ~/.config/kdeglobals, which can happen when the browser received permission from the user to set itself as the default browser rather than the user specifically marking it as the default browser in System Settings (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Python 3 script files now get the correct icon (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The backend code for Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode has been completely rewritten, which hugely improves performance and fixes a variety of bugs such as being unable to easily escape from Rectangular Region mode under certain circumstances and capturing the mouse pointer too late (Ambareesh Balaji, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• In Konsole, inactive tabs that receive a notification and have their title text color changed now reset the color to the normal tab title text color when the tab is activated (Tomaz Canabrava, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Konsole’s Edit Profile dialog received a huge user interface overhaul (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
  
• Konsole’s Breeze color scheme is now used as the default Konsole color scheme, and has better contrast and consistency with the systemwide Breeze theme (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Dolphin’s “Compress” and Extract context menu items now display appropriate icons (Nicolas Fella, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• It’s now possible to open an item in the breadcrumbs bar from its context menu (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• Improved the behavior and consistency of the URL navigator/path bar in Dolphin and the open/save dialogs: now ctrl+L makes the location bar editable and focused and selects all the text; however when all of those are already true it instead returns it to breadcrumbs mode (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54 and KDE Applications 19.04.0)

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

There’s big news in Usability & Productivity: Firefox 64 can now use native KDE open/save dialogs! This is optional, bleeding-edge functionality so no distros ship with it yet, but it’s pretty simple to enable yourself:

1. Make sure you’re using Firefox 64
2. Install the xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-kde packages
3. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in Firefox’s Desktop file. Here’s how: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/a5cxwk/firefox_v64_can_now_use_the_kde_file_selection/ebmemp1/

Once you do this, Firefox should use native KDE open/save dialogs! Please give this a shot and test it out so bugs (like the empty filename field) can be found and fixed, which will make distros more likely to turn it on automatically. On that subject, I’ve filed tickets to get this integrated by default for Kubuntu and Manjaro.

If you find a problem, file a bug to the “xdg-desktop-portal-kde” product.

Of course that’s not all: a lot of improvements have been made to Discover, Plasma, and, heck, all over the place!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Plasma no longer crashes when clicking on the clipboard dialog’s “Disable this Popup” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Discover, when viewing a Snap app’s available channels, the version of the app available in each channel is now displayed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover’s app progress detail view no longer visually changes when you hover the mouse over a task, because nothing happens when you click on it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Ubuntu-based distros, Discover now respects the system’s user-configurable check-for-updates frequency setting (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover no longer futilely offers to show dependencies for locally-downloaded packages (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover once again shows a Cancel button in its toolbar when an app is in the middle of installing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now displays the correct set of information for locally-downloaded Flatpak packages that have fetchable metadata (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover no longer crashes when uninstalling multiple apps in rapid succession (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed a weird bug in Discover that could cause the Featured list to lose entries after installing an app when multiple backends and sources are configured (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In System Settings, it’s once again possible to set a font DPI lower than 96 (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When a dialog window is open and its parent window is minimized, the dialog window now gets minimized too (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Discover and other Kirigami-based apps, scrollable views’ scrollbars no longer overlap the content and no longer unexpectedly scroll to the top under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The context menu for Trash icons on the desktop once again shows the “Empty Trash” menu item (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Drop-down menus in QML-and-Kirigami-based apps no longer have background highlights that are sometimes too short (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• SQLite files now get appropriate icons (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  

User Interface Improvements

• While in Panel Edit Mode, it’s now a bit easier to figure out how to move a panel: the cursor changes to a more appropriate icon when hovered over the Screen Edge button, and when you click on it instead of dragging it, a helpful tooltip appears letting you know what to do (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The button on a panel that allows you to enter Panel Edit Mode and configure your panel now uses the standard “Configure” icon, instead of a hamburger menu icon (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The context menu for desktop icons is now identical to Dolphin’s (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

  

• Improved the user interface of the list view in the Desktop Effects System Settings page in various ways (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now remembers your preferred sort order on the search results and Installed pages (KDE Plasma 5.15.0, Alex Pol Gonzalez)
• Discover’s Sources page now has a better interaction model: the list items are no longer uselessly clickable, and items that can be somehow interacted with have inline buttons (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, our flagship Kate text editor got a lot of love–and there’s more in the pipeline too! But that’s not all…

New Features

• Bluetooth devices now show their battery status in the power plasmoid (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Notes widget now has a “Transparent with light text” theme (KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Baloo file indexer is now able to extract and display cover art for .asf, .wav, .aiff, .ape, .wavpack and .speex files (Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Kate’s File menu and tab context menu now feature a bunch of useful new actions: Rename, Delete, Open Containing Folder, Copy File Path, Compare [with another open file], and Properties (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When scrolling through lists of Plasma addons in Discover, images are now properly cached so they don’t reload when you scroll backwards (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0
• The names of color schemes are now translatable, and should be translated soon (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Much more metadata from image EXIF data is now visible in Dolphin, Gwenview, Baloo, etc. (Alexanter Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Made some progress on the Samba share discovery issue: when using a modern version of the SMB protocol, now Samba shares for Mac and Linux machines can be discovered (Harald Sitter, KDE Applicstions 19.04.0)
• Konsole now does a better job of rendering box and line characters (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Improved the user interface and layout for the Digital Clock’s settings window, which fixes various bugs (Marco Martin and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
  
• The wallpaper chooser interface now looks good when using a fractional scale factor and no longer cuts off the text of the “Get New Plugins…” button (Marco Martin, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In the Devices Notifier plasmoid, devices’ eject icons are now better aligned (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When you try to copy a file greater than 4GB in size to a FAT-32 formatted disk (which cannot support files of that size), an appropriate error message is now displayed (Shubham, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The Baloo file indexer now indexes metadata in SVG images (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• When using Kate’s Build View plugin, there is now better error handling when the build directory cannot be created (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Improved the user interface for Kate’s Code Analysis feature (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity we did a lot of work on our Plasma 5.12 long-term support release and performance improvements for KIO and Baloo (many of which are not individually significant enough to be mentioned here, but will add up to some great improvements over time). Lots of nice bugfixes and new features snuck in, too.

New Features

• Plasma’s Network Manager now allows configuring IP Tunnel settings (Pranav Gade, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Konsole, it’s now possible to quickly switch between the current and previous tab using ctrl+tab (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Choosing a particular app as your default browser now actually works when the one listed in the combobox is already the one you want and you don’t need to change it (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• GTK-based apps run in Plasma no longer use the wrong cursor by default (Fabian Vogt, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Made the Global Menu work with a few more odd apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• The Audio Settings page is now always translated properly when opened in its standalone form (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• Fixed a few ways that the Comics widget could crash (Pavel Mos, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• Text in System Settings’ scrollable sidebar (as well as other users of the Kirigami UI toolkit and throughout Plasma) no longer displays graphical glitches when scrolling with a touchpad (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• It’s now possible to find files rated 5 stars with the Baloo file indexing system (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Improved small file copy speed in KIO by being smarter about how timestamps are compared (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Radically improved small file copy speed in KIO (14 hours to 10 minutes, in one case) with some code optimizations that are too clever for me to understand them (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• In Dolphin, when using icon view and icons are sorted by size, going back no longer selects multiple unrelated files or folders (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Filenames on desktop icons now have enough horizontal space to be legible even when their icons are very tiny (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
• Filenames on desktop icons are now easier to read when the wallpaper is very light-colored or visually busy (me: nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
  
• The Info Center app now opens to a sensible default window size so no scrollbars are required and nothing gets cut off (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
• When enough apps have been added to the Kickoff Application Launcher’s favorites list that it becomes scrollable, it now defaults to showing the top of the list, not the bottom (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Comboboxes in QML and Kirigami apps and Plasma now open on click, not on click-and-release (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• AppImage apps now get their own icons when previews are turned off (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Frameworks 5.53):
  
• Breeze icons for muted and off status are now better and more consistent (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• Okular’s document display now stays aligned to the available viewing area better when using keyboard navigation (Tobias Deiminger, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• When opening multiple files in Kate using the command line, the files are opened in new tabs that have the same ordering that was specified on the command line (Guillermo Molteni, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity was full of bug squashing and user interface polishing! We landed a lot of nice fixes and improvements rather than focusing on big new features, and hopefully you’ll like them all!

Bugfixes

• In Discover, links in the descriptions for Add-On pages are now clickable (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover no longer complains that AppStream isn’t set up (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When there’s a Trash icon on the desktop, its context menu now displays the correct “Empty Trash” text (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The weather widget now correctly handles a temperature of zero degrees (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When using a Global Menu, the menu correctly empties itself when its window becomes minimized and inaccessible (Michail Vourlakos, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When manually removing files and folders from the trash, symlinks are now preserved instead of being silently deleted (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Fixed a bug that was preventing KIO from using a speed optimization when moving or copying fixes, which should improve performance (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• User interfaces that employ the Kirigami FormLayout, such as the Workspace and Mouse System Settings pages, are now always laid out correctly (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Breeze icons are no longer too light when used outside of KDE Plasma (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Middle-clicking on the breadcrumbs bar of an inactive split view in Dolphin now correctly opens the middle-clicked-on folder in a new tab (Thomas Surrel, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• The “Only show when using the application” feature for Places panel items now works in Dolphin (Elvis Angelaccio, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• When run on Wayland, Spectacle no longer frustratingly presents features that are not yet supported and don’t work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole no longer presents a non-functional option to remove “-Konsole” from the titlebar (Andrew Smith, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole’s “Vary the background for each tab” feature now works when the base background color is very dark or black (Andrew Smith, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

UI Polish & Improvement

• It’s now possible to close the Application Dashboard by clicking in the empty space in the search results view (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• The task manager’s window preview tooltips now better handle an enormous number of windows being open (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• In System Settings’ icon view, the background is now flat, instead of showing a gradient that was impossible for most screens to render properly (Jan Przybylak, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Dolphin, the move-to-trash/delete context menu item is now disabled rather than hidden when the selected item cannot be deleted (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• In Kate, the Comment feature is now smart enough to uncomment currently-commented code (Silas Lenz, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• In Kate, three more plugins are now enabled by default, including the popular and useful inline Terminal feature (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Let’s have a bit more Usability & Productivity, shall we? The KDE Applications 18.12 release is right around the corner, and we got a lot of great improvements to some core KDE apps–some for that upcoming release, and some for the next one. And lots of other things too, of course!

New Features

• It’s now possible to mark a network connection as “metered” (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Dolphin now shows a list of any active tags in the Places Panel (Nicolas Fella, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Dolphin now lets you assign or remove tags to items using the context menu (Nicolas Fella, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Bugfixes

• The Breeze and Breeze Snow crosshair cursors now look much better and are actually distinguishable against dark and light backgrounds, respectively (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
• Discover once again shows progress for update tasks (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• The VPN configuration interface is now usable on a small screen (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• The Fade, Glide, and Scale effect are now mutually exclusive (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When you change the titlebar font size in such a manner that it will cause the titlebar to become taller, that size now change takes place immediately rather than after a reboot (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Konsole now behaves better on the GNOME dash (David Hallas, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• In Dolphin, after you unmount a volume from the Places panel, it’s now possible to mount it again (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• In Konsole, when shift-clicking to extend a selection that was originally generated by double- or triple-clicking on text, the selection is extended by individual words for a double-click, or by whole lines for a triple-click(Glenn Coombs, KDE Applications 18.12)
• In Discover (and all Kirigami apps using multi-column navigation), it’s now possible to interact with user interface elements on columns that are visible but not focused (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)

UI Polish & Improvement

• KRunner no longer shows duplicates when files are available in multiple categories (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• Discover now features improved handling and presentation for errors arising from misconfigured add-on repos (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now supports Flatpak extensions, and lets you choose which ones of them you want to install (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• We have awesome new sorting icons, one of which is now used in a new sort order chooser toolbar button in the file open/save dialogs (Rafael Brandmaier and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.53):
  
• Dolphin now has a menu item you can use to show all hidden Places panel entries (Chris Rizzitello, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  
• Kate’s embedded terminal now automatically synchronizes the current directory with the location of whatever file is open, and can now be focused and de-focused using the semi-standard F4 keyboard shortcut (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• In Kate, when the Quick Open view is already open, trying to open it again will now switch back to viewing the open document (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• Kate, KDevelop, and other apps using the KSyntaxHighlighting framework now offer syntax highlighting for BrightScript files (Daniel Levin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
• Sublime Text gets a nice new Breeze icon (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.53):
  

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 my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.