This week in Usability & Productivity, part 36

Greetings, KDE-loving humans! This week’s Usability & Productivity is a heavy one in terms of importance. We scored awesome fixes and improvements through the KDE software stack for subjects as varied as Libinput mouse and touchpad device handling, Task Manager icon sorting for LibreOffice, and a snazzy new unified mailbox in KMail. Have a look:

New Features

• unified inbox

  KMail can now display a unified inbox (Daniel Vrátil, KDE Applications 18.12.0):

  

Bugfixes

• Fixed a wide variety of problems with touchpad and mouse configuration resetting or becoming overridden when using the common Libinput driver. This fix will require testing, so please check out the Plasma 5.14 beta ! (Roman Gilg, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• When pinned to a Task Manager, LibreOffice and other apps that inappropriately change their WM_CLASS values no longer jump around after being launched (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Fixed a case where Plasma could hang after losing connectivity to a mounted remote location (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Plasma Task Manager now respects virtual desktops when deciding how to group multiple instances or windows of a running application (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• When Dolphin is used outside of KDE Plasma, the Ctrl+T shortcut no longer falsely generates “ambiguous shortcut” warnings (Jaime Torres Amate, KDE Applications 18.08.2)
• Spectacle now marks an image’s filename with the timestamp from when the image was created, not when it was saved (Kyle Utecht, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• Fixed some issues with Bash and Perl syntax highlighting in Kate, KDevelop, and other similar KDE apps (Nibaldo González, KDE Frameworks 5.51)

UI Polish & Improvement

• The interface for installing other programs from within KDE apps now has an improved user interface with fewer levels of hierarchy (Nicolas Fella, KDE Framewotks 5.51):
  
• The Baloo file indexer now excludes by default various file formats used for bioinformatics that may be extremely large and useless to index (Nicolas Fella, KDE Frameworks 5.51)
• The controversial turquoise line underneath the titlebar is now off by default (Fabian Vogt, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Printer plasmoid is now only visible on the panel when something is actually printing, and only visible in the pop-up when there are any printers configured (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• KRunner now uses less technical and more consistent terminology for “Suspend” and “Hibernate” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• KRunner’s settings page now offers links to open the spellchecking and web shortcuts settings from their plugins (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Track Mouse desktop effect’s settings window received a user interface overhaul and now allows the effect to be triggered with both a keyboard shortcut and by holding down modifier keys (Vlad Vagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  

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