KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 79

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 5.61)
• 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’ settings now 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 .