This week in Usability & Productivity, part 47

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 (Kai Uwe Broulik, 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!

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