It’s time for week 60 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and this one is positively overflowing with goodies! Will you even be able to handle it? I THINK NOT!!! But read it and see:

New Features

• KMenuEdit now has a search field that can be used to find items in the list if applications (Aidan Sojourner, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

  

• Kate (and other apps using the KSyntaxHighlighting framework) can now show highlighting for many more languages inside markdown formatting (Jos van den Oever, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Kate can now optionally show all invisible whitespace characters, not just some (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Kate’s status bar now has a menu with options for the current dictionary language and spellchecking (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Okular now supports editing LaTeX documents in TexStudio (Yuri Chornoivan, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KDE open/save dialogs accessed via the XDG Portal (e.g. in Firefox) now allows multi-selection (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• KWin no longer crashes upon launching a game in certain circumstances (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• While using Discover to install an app that’s available from multiple sources, the sources menu no longer changes its text to null during installation (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• The Picture of the Day wallpaper configuration interface now looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
  
• KInfoCenter’s “Help” button now works again (Harald Sitter, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• When using the KDE open/save dialogs via the XDG Portal (e.g. in Firefox), trying to overwrite a file now displays a confirmation dialog instead of just silently doing it and then closing (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• In Discover’s sources lists, text containing the repo name now gets elided rather than overlapping the inline buttons when there’s not much room (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• When Dolphin is unable to create a file or folder whose name is too long, the resulting error message no longer inappropriately resizes the parent window (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• Fixed some visual glitches in Kate, KDevelop and other apps using the KTextEditor framework that could cause dots show up at on deleted lines at the end of a document or make the bottom few pixels of text lines get clipped off (Christoph Cullmann, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when a file in the trash is drag-and-dropped back into the trash (David Hallas, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• The Baloo file indexing service no longer causes crashes in apps used to access tags:/ (Jonathan Marten, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Konsole can once again render bold text (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Fixed a memory leak in Dolphin (David Hallas, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover’s Sources dropdown menu now makes each item look like it’s an exclusive radio button, and uses a better icon for distro sources (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
  

  

• It’s now possible to switch to an alternative Task Manager from the context menu even when the entire thing is full of tasks and there’s no empty space (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.3):
  
• Category labels in Plasma configuration windows now become multiline strings instead of taking up 100% of the available horizontal space and looking glued to the edges (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.15.3):
  
• The 12/24 hour clock setting in the Digital Clock widget’s settings window now has a sensible user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• A number of Plasma settings windows have been ported to QtQuickControls2 and given a user interface overhaul (Filip Fila and Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
  
• Throughout Plasma, the word “Sleep” is now used in place of “Suspend” (Me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

  

• KSysGuard’s search field now displays a tooltip when hovering the mouse over it that reveals som if its power and features (Simone Gaiarin, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Kirigami convergent UI toolkit gained a standardized text-field-with-inline-actions component, which means that all of our QML software will soon be able to have a totally consistent look and feel for search fields (Carl Schwan, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Kate’s file tree now has a “Show Containing Folder” entry in the document view (Kai Uwe Broulik, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This is week 59 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, we’ve got lots of juicy improvements for our apps! In addition to lots of nice improvements for Plasma and Frameworks, the KDE Applications 19.04.0 release comes out in a little under two months and we’ve been working hard to add awesome new features. Check it out:

New Features

• Implemented KRun support in portals, which allows Flatpak apps to be able to open content in other apps using the typical KDE app chooser window (Denis Karpovskiy, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Spectacle now has a new default option to remember the current rectangular region selection box, but only until the program is closed (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Spectacle now lets the user configure what happens when the screenshot shortcut is pressed while Spectacle is already running (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Gwenview can now open Krita image files (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• In Gwenview, it’s now possible to browse between images using the back and forward buttons that are present on many mice (Anthony Fieroni, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole now allows tabs to be created by middle-clicking on empty parts of the tab bar, and also has an option to allow tabs to be closed by middle-clicking on them (Shubham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Fixed a case where the current window could appear twice in the Desktop Grid overview (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
• Setting the mouse middle button to open the Application Launcher no longer breaks unrelated parts of the Plasma desktop (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
• Discover no longer crashes when opened using a malformed appstream:// URL (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer unexpectedly and inappropriately responds to window tiling and maximization keyboard shortcuts (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer allows the username and system information text to overlap under certain circumstances (Matthieu Gras, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• Returned the default Breeze window and menu shadow color to being pure black, which makes shadows visible again when using the Breeze Dark color scheme (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The “Share to Imgur” feature now actually works in all KDE apps that implement it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Dolphin et al. will now show more metadata for AppImage apps when a recent version of the libappimage library is installed (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• Dolphin no longer crashes on quit when there is more than one Activity and one of them is stopped while Dolphin is still running (David Hallas, KDE Applications 18.12.3)
• Fixed odd display of some box characters in Konsole (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover no longer shows a misleading message saying “Please check your connectivity” while loading content immediately after being launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• When about to update the system using Discover, long ugly package version strings no longer get cut off when there’s not much horizontal space, such as when using widescreen view and looking at a package description page (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
  
• Made some major improvements to the user interface of the System Settings Emoticons page (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Discover’s Updates page now has improved display for the number of updates in the header on top (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• We now have beautiful new icons for Suspend, Hibernate, and Switch User, among others (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• We have a nice new video camera icon, which will soon start showing up in various places (Rafael Brandmaier and Krešimir Čohar , KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• When a Kirigami app has a toolbar button that opens a dropdown menu when clicked, the menu no longer shows a tooltip if hovered over while the menu itself is visible (Aleix Pol Gonzales, KDE Frameworks 5.56)

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 58 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! Hot on the heels of last week’s update, we’ve got lots of nice goodies to share:

New Features

• The System Settings Window Decorations page has been completely rewritten, bringing it into greater conformance with the modern visual style and fixing a huge number of bugs in the process (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Dolphin now lets the user choose which split view will be closed by the “Close Split” button (Angelo Oliveira Jr., KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Okular gained a command-line argument to open a file and instantly highlight all occurrences of a given string (Joao Netto, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The Weather widget now correctly displays weather alert text when there’s either a watch or a warning, but not both at the same time (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Fixed the most common crash-on-launch issue in Discover that was plaguing many users who have devices capable of being updated with fwupd, but had not actually applied the update yet (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.14.5.1)
• Icons on Discover’s Updates page no longer glitch out when using the three-column widescreen view and clicking on the “More Information” button for the selected package (Jonah Brüchert, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
• The Digital Clock widget’s 12-hour/24-hour toggle now works again (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
• By default, the Task Manager now only shows tasks from the current virtual desktop (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Ported the System Settings Audio Volume page to QtQuickControls2 and Kirigami, which makes it look good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• GTK 3 applications no longer spew zillions of warnings to the console (Andrzej Broński, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Scrollbars in Kirigami apps now behave the same as other scrollbars: left-clicking in the trough does a PageUp/PageDown action, and middle-clicking will zoom directly to the clicked location (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Restoring manually-saved Plasma sessions now works with all apps again (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Long wallpaper names can no longer blend into one another (Filip Fila, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Plasma can no longer crash when BZip2 support abruptly disappears (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• The Baloo file indexing service now correctly indexes folders that were moved from a non-indexed location to an indexed location (Igor Poboiko, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Wide characters such as some Emojis are now displayed properly in Konsole (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• When a folder is opened in a new tab in Dolphin, the new tab is placed immediately to the right of the current one instead of always on the end of the tab bar (David Hallas, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The Networks widget is now faster to refresh wifi networks, and more reliable at doing so (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• In System Settings, the Look and Feel page is now a top-level item, because it affects everything (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• When you hide the Desktop Toolbox, an informational message tells you how to return to the configuration window without it (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Inline buttons in Kirigami lists are now real ToolButtons, so they change their appearance appropriately when hovered over or clicked (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• When a Kirigami app sends a low-priority transient notification of the type that automatically disappears after seven seconds, the countdown timer now only starts when the parent window has focus, so you don’t miss the notification if the window was behind another one or minimized or something (Kai Uwe Broulik and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Konsole now has an on-by-default option to display close buttons on individual tabs, like most other tabbed apps do nowadays (KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Much more image metadata is now displayed clearly in apps like Dolphin (Alexander Stippich, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Get ready for a humongous monster week 57 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative and there’s a metric tonne of stuff!!! So go make yourself a cup of tea or coffee and settle in for a long list of improvements. 🙂

But first I want to mention that we’re working on fixes for Discover users in Plasma 5.14.5 who are stuck unable to update. We’ve pushed a fix into the 5.14 branch that should cause the stuck backend to time out after one minute, allowing everything else to work. We’ll be releasing a Plasma 5.14.5.1 bugfix release, inclusing this fix. Fear not, we won’t leave you out in the icy cold blackness of night… alone, hungry, and unable to upgrade your software using a GUI application?

Also it’s already fixed in Plasma 5.15. 🙂

We’ve also backported a number of other fixes onto the 5.14 branch and I hope we can ship one more bugfix release of 5.14 just to ensure that the quality is as high as possible for the upcoming Debian Stable freeze.

New Features

• Audio CDs can now be ripped to files in the Opus file format (Yuri Chornoivan, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• eBook files (.epub and .fb2) now get thumbnails (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Windows .xps files and some Microsoft Office files now get thumbnails (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When auto-login is enabled, the session you automatically log into is always correct and no longer sometimes unexpectedly changes after you adjust unrelated settings in the System Settings Login Screen page (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• When a window is in full screen mode and the system is restarted, that window now correctly restores the window borders after being un-full-screened (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher now opens to the correct view after previously having closed it following aborting a search on a non-default tab (Krešimir Čohar , KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• When using the legacy Evdev mouse input driver, user-customized settings in the System Settings Mouse page are now correctly applied on startup, login, and after waking from sleep (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.14.5.1)
• The System Tray’s pop-up no longer becomes non-interactive after an item’s visibility is changed (Tranter Madi, KDE Plasma 5.14.5.1)
• When using software rendering on a weak graphics card, the login and lock screens now ensure readability by putting outlines around the white text instead of the previously-un-renderable shadow (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The System Setting Login Screen page now visually remembers custom images chosen for the login screen background and can handle being given a new wallpaper image with the same name (but a different path) as the current image (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• System Settings no longer crashes under certain circumstances after visiting the Launch Feedback page (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Screen Edge’s glow effect is now properly blue, rather than having an ugly gray edge, and also looks straight rather than like a bumpy wave (Vlad Zagorodniy, and Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.15.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• All System Settings pages with Grid Views now sort the content alphabetically rather than pseudo-randomly (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
• Improved Discover’s reliability in the face of flaky content from store.kde.org (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When using multiple screens, the lock screen’s focus follows the screen where the mouse cursor is located (Andrey Bychkov, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• New-style grid views used in many System Settings pages and the wallpaper chooser now have inline buttons that are legible and obvious against any kind of background (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• Dragging desktop icons (and many more things) once again works properly when using Qt 5.11 or later (Tranter Madi, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• When changing the color scheme, Plasma now updates all of its colors immediately, with no need for a log-out-and-then-log-back-in cycle (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• When using Kate’s Print Preview functionality, the text now gets the correct color irrespective of the active color scheme (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Kate’s Project plugin’s tree view now displays all menu items for git entries that have umlauts in their names (Dominik Haumann, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The Task Manager now allows re-ordering items via drag-and-drop by default (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Wallpaper chooser views now display the name of the wallpaper (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• In System Settings, Breeze theme previews are now accurate Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Standalone app launcher widgets now display a spinning busy indicator while launching, just like their pinned Task Manager launcher equivalents (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The Color Picker widget now lets you drag the current color right off the widget itself without having to open it first (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Many System Settings pages now have improved icons (Rafael Brandmaier, Noah Davis, and Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Plasma dialogs, OSDs, and panels now have subtly rounded corners (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• QML Spinboxes now display the correct I-beam cursor when hovering over the number (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• The default search providers now get appropriate icons (Shubham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• Dolphin’s Downloads folder is now sorted by date with grouping on by default. and the Recent Documents view (accessible by navigating to recentdocuments:/) is now sorted by date with a list view by default (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Gwenview now uses the standard Ctrl+L keyboard shortcut to focus the URL field, and Ctrl+Shift+R for “Rotate left” (Shubham, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Here are the results of week 56 of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. We’ve been working on Plasma 5.16 features and fixing old bugs in Plasma 5.12 and beyond.

One additional thing I’d like to mention is that we’re aware that many users of Discover in Plasma 5.14 are suffering from an inability to either check for updates or update their systems. This issue is fixed in Plasma 5.15 and beyond, but we’re working on a fix for Plasma 5.14 users that can be backported. Sorry for the breakage, everyone!

Anyway, onto the good stuff…

New Features

• KSysGuard’s search field now accepts a comma-separated list of process names or IDs so you can monitor just a few things at once (Tomaz Canabrava, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Networks widget now has a button to display a search field to help you find a particular network from among the available choices (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When dragging-and-dropping icons on the desktop over other icons, the dragged-over icons no longer disappear under certain circumstances (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Desktop icons no longer sometimes get scrambled or rearranged after a reboot (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Desktop icons no longer sometimes become visibly duplicated after creating a new folder (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• System Settings’ sidebar list back button now always has the correct color no matter what color scheme is being used (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• QML Comboboxes always show all items in their pop-up, and can now be closed by clicking anywhere else in the window just like QWidgets Comboboxes (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Okular now properly displays links in Markdown documents that span more than one line (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• You can now right-click on networks in the Network widget to expose a “Configure…” action (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• KWin’s blur effect now looks more natural and correct to the human eye by not unnecessary darkening the area between blurred colors (Alex Nemeth, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Print Manager now indicates what’s asking for your password and where it will be sent, which the last of the barriers to making it available on Debian (Michael Weghown, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Kirigami Toolbar buttons now all have the same visual style as other KDE-style toolbars on the desktop (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.55)
• After opening a new tab in Dolphin, that new tab’s view now automatically gains keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Spectacle no longer displays both “Full Screen (All Monitors)” and “Current Screen” options when your computer only has one screen (Emirald Mateli, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

First I have some exciting personal news to share: I’ve been hired by Blue Systems to work on KDE projects full time as QA manager!

This means I don’t need community sponsorship via Patreon and will be shutting it down after this month. I’ll be keeping the PayPal and LiberaPay links to serve as a sort of “digital tip jar”, but I don’t need longer looking for internet money to support my family. Blue Systems is seeing to that now. 🙂

I have a lot of plans for how to polish up KDE software 2019 and I’m super excited to get started with no distractions!

Anyway, let’s move onto week 55 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. I want to give a shout-out to our Breeze icon team, whose members have been just knocking it out of the the park lately. For example Rafael Brandmaier just fixed a 14 year-old bug yesterday! A lot of the work will show up in Plasma 5.16, but some of it will be visible in upcoming Frameworks releases too. Check out the full Breeze Icons commit log! Of course we have more than just icons:

New Features

• The System Settings Colors page has been rewritten for better usability and consistency with other pages (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Tooltips in GTK 2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape are no longer unreadable when the app is launched by opening a document from the file manager (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• The Date & Time icon is now visible when using Breeze Dark and in System Settings’ tooltips (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.55):
  
• On the System Settings Cursors page, the cursor size combobox now reflects your actual cursor size instead of always saying “Resolution Independent” (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Global Menu widget now displays its name when there’s no menu available, which improves the default display and makes it harder to think you’ve accidentally deleted the contents of your panel or something (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Various QML-based System Settings pages are no longer very slow when opened in standalone form using kcmshell5 (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The Analog Clock’s configuration window now has an improved layout and looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The button that lets you configure a panel now has a tooltip to make this more obvious (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Desktop Toolbox now shows its own name and better displays the current activity when it’s not in the corner (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Kate now displays a Cancel button to allow you to end long-running tasks such as large search-and-replace operations (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Okular’s Trim tools now have fancy new icons (Rafael Brandmaier and me: Nate Graham, 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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, something big landed: virtual desktop support on Wayland, accompanied by a shiny new user interface for the X11 version too. Eike Hein, Marco Martin, and the rest of the Plasma hackers have been working on this literally for months and I think they deserves a round of applause! It was a truly enormous amount of work, but now we can benefit for years to come. 🙂

We’ve also kicked off the Plasma 5.15 beta period. Here’s how you can test it with KDE Neon or Kubuntu.

Bug reports have already started to come in and we’re fixing them as fast as possible to ensure a smooth release next month on February 12th!

New Features

• The digital Clock widget now lets you change the date formatting however you please (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Devices Notifier widget now has a button that lets you unmount all mounted disks at once (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• The NOAA Picture Of The Day wallpaper source works again (Tagore Chandan Reddy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed a bug that could cause in-titlebar menus do disappear after restoring a session (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Info Center’s USB devices section now displays all USB devices (Alexandre Ferreira, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• All the hands on the Analog Clock widget now cast a shadow (me: Nate Graham and Shubham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Long tooltips in QML/Kirigami apps and windows no longer get cut off at the edge of the window (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.55):
  

User Interface Improvements

• The clock in the System Settings Date & Time page now looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
• The wallpaper chooser view now looks good with all default wallpaper plugins when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Network Monitor widget now features a clearer legend for its graph (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plas,a 5.15.0):
  
• It’s now easier to find and use KRunner’s time plugin (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When searching for an app in KRunner, if Discover is opened as a result, it displays a search field as expected (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen)
• KMail now lets you turn off the unread count badge on its Task Manager icon, which can be useful for people whose email workflows leave a lot of messages unread (Laurent Montel, KMail 5.11.0)
• Dolphin now warns you if you try to quit while the terminal panel is open with a still-running program (Roman Inflianskas and me: Nate Graham, 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.

I totally missed that last week marked the one-year anniversary of my documentation and guidance of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. I think we’ve achieved a lot over the course of that year!

Note that this is NOT an exhaustive log of everything that happened this week in the entire KDE community, or even in all of Plasma. The actual number of commits and improvements is always vast and enormous–too much to comprehend, really. The KDE Community is staggeringly productive.

Rather, this is always a curated list of only the user-facing improvements I believe are directly relevant to the Usability & Productivity initiative. And speaking of it, this week we got an interesting assortment of new features, bugfixes, and UI improvements–many of which I didn’t mention but will ultimately be appreciated when taken together. Check it out:

New Features

• Okular now features support for viewing and verifying digital signatures in PDF files(Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Gwenview now supports large 512 px thumbnails (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Discover’s search on the Installed Apps page now works properly when the Snap backend is installed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The KWin window manager no longer crashes when a window is minimized via a script (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Header text throughout Plasma and KDE apps is no longer very thin–sometimes almost illegibly so–when using Qt 5.12 (Filip Filla and Krešimir Čohar, KDE Frameworks 5.55)
• Apps written in Qt that don’t use KDE Frameworks no longer get ugly ampersands inserted into user interface controls (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Frameworks 5.55))

User Interface Improvements

• On the Activities page in System Settings, the buttons are now vertically centered and no longer let you futilely try to delete the last activity, which is not deletable (David Edmundson and me: Nate Graham KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
  
• The System Settings Login Screen page received a number of visual improvements: The default Breeze theme’s image preview was updated to reflect its current appearance, the background color of the preview is now color-scheme-aware, and the sizes and margins were tweaked to make sure that everything fits without being cut off (Filip Fila, Björn Feber, and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The System Settings page for choosing window decorations buttons received a visual overhaul, fixing many bugs in the process (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Devices Notifier no longer lets you futilely try to unmount the root partition when configured to display all disks rather than just removable disks (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Ported the System Settings Desktop Effects page to QtQuickControls 2, which fixes a number of issues such as bad fractional scaling appearance, ugly dropdown menu checkboxes, and the window size being too small when opened as a standalone app (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When using Discover to launch an installed app, the cursor now shows the “launching” animation (if one is configured) so you can tell that something is actually happening (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Plasma Device Notifier now shows a busy indicator while a device is unmounting (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Improved the padding and appearance of notification pop-ups (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• All search fields in Plasma and System Settings are now consistent in their use of text and ellipses (Krešimir Čohar, Filip Filla, and Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0 and KDE Frameworks 5.55)
• Gwenview’s filter-by-name feature is now invokable using the ctrl+i shortcut, matching the behavior in Dolphin (me: Nate Graham, 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, the KDE VDG worked very intensively on aesthetics. The Breeze icon theme gained a lot of attention, resulting in many improvements, and we now have a good number of icon designers diligently working through a backlog of issues. More is on the way too, with several enthusiastic new VDG members who combine an eye for design with strong technical abilities. Expect good things to come of this!

New Features

• When using the YaST configuration app on openSUSE, icons now get Breeze versions when using the Breeze icon theme (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.54)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When using Wayland, resizing a window now results in the correct cursor being used (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Plasma no longer crashes when switching windows in certain ways (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Devices like memory card readers are no longer unnecessarily powered down when their cards/disks are ejected (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Discover no longer gets stuck in a state where both the “Update all” and “Check for Updates” buttons are grayed out (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Dolphin split views now keep the correct titles when switching and closing views (Elvis Angelaccio, KDE Applications 18.12.1)
• Konsole tabs now display their titles more accurately in a variety of circumstances (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• System Settings now shows helpful tooltips for all items in the sidebar, not just items on the first level of navigation (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The default image fill mode for wallpapers is now “Scaled and Cropped”, which has the advantage of not deforming images whose aspect ratio differs from that of the screen (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The plasma-workspace-wallpapers package–which is shipped by default on Manjaro, and hopefully soon will be in Neon and Kubuntu—now includes some of the best recent Plasma wallpapers (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Discover’s Updates page now shows the old and new versions of packages right there on the page (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

  

• Kolf gained a beautiful new icon (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• A variety of Breeze device and preference icons have been improved, including the multimedia icons and all icons that depict a stylized version of a Plasma wallpaper. Some examples can be seen in other screenshots in this post! (Björn Feber, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• Dolphin now displays an error message when you try to create a new folder with the same name as an existing folder (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  
• Konsole’s profile switching shortcuts now switch the current tab’s profile instead of opening a new tab with the other profile (Thomas Surrel, 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.

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.