This week in Usability & Productivity, part 45

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):
  
• Dolohin 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!

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