This week in Usability & Productivity, part 39

Welcome to an especially humongous week in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! I typically assemble these reports incrementally over the course of the week, as fixes trickle in. But this week, I had to spend almost 4 hours yesterday getting it ready after an enormous flood of incredible work on Friday and Saturday. And there was a time at around 6 PM when patches for Baloo started pouring in faster than my capacity to review them (expect more on Baloo next week). KDE Contributors were truly on a roll! Check out the veritable flood of improvement throughout KDE’s software stack over the past few days:

New Features

• Gwenview can now be configured to zoom in and out of images just by scrolling , no need to use a modifier key first (Chris Suran, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• Text annotations in Okular can now be drawn in any color . The toolbar button even shows the color; how cool is that!? (Dileep Sankhla and Tobias Deiminger, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  
• Konsole now fully supports emoji characters (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

Bugfixes

• The most common way that the Baloo file indexing system could crash has now been fixed (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.51)
• Discover can once again be used to turn repos and PPAs on and off on the Settings page (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Discover no longer lets you try to browse apps from Snap or distro repos on the Settings page when it won’t work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Fixed a place where Discover could crash when installing Snap apps (Aleix Pol Gnzales, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Global Menu now works with Flatpak’ed KDE apps again (Jan Grulich, soon)
• KRunner no longer shows duplicate bookmarks from Firefox (Stefan Brüns, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When using a Folder View widget in a panel, its file list can once again be navigated using the keyboard (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Fixed a variety of other keyboard navigation issues with Folder View widgets on panels (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed keyboard navigation for the Konsole Profiles widget (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When using GNOME apps, the corner resize cursors are now correctly used from the Breeze theme, if it’s active (Nicolas Fella, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed a bug that could cause removable media to still appear in the Device Notifier and Places panel after being removed (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.51)
• Dolphin can once again automatically install Samba packages if necessary the first time you tell it to share a folder (Rik Mills, KDE Applications 18.08.2)
• In Dolphin, it’s no longer possible to accidentally start renaming a while after dragging it (Andreas, Krutzler, KDE Applications 18.12.2)
• KCalc now behaves properly when you repeat the same calculation using the = button or the Enter key (Maximilian Schiller, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

UI Polish & Improvement

• It’s now more obvious in Discover how to manage distro repositories , and those repositories are now shown with more clarity in Ubuntu-based distros (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• Discover’s Update Notifier widget now displays a “Restart” button if a restart is recommended after applying all updates but the user hasn’t actually restarted yet (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher’s search field now looks like a search field , which fixes various bugs (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Plasma is now a little bit (100ms) faster to start up (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The term “Shut Down” is now consistently used in the user interface for actions , replacing the grammatically incorrect term “Shutdown” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• By default (i.e. for new installs), the Places panel now displays a better icon for the Network place (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.51):
  
• Disks no longer receive an emblem when mounted ; now they only get one when they have some unusual status–unmounted, encrypted, etc. This results in greater ability to distinguish the icon used for the disk, particularly at small sizes; see the following pictures for examples! (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.51)
• We got a new icon for hard drives , which results in a hugely improved appearance in the Places Panel (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.51):
  
• The “Edit…” context menu item for Places panel entries now uses the correct icon (Thomas Surrel, KDE Frameworks 5.51 and Applications 18.12.0):
  
• When viewing the Properties dialog for the root volume, the volume’s hardware disk is now listed (Thumas Surrel, KDE Frameworks 5.51)

What exciting time to be alive, huh? All of this stuff is available for free, and improves at lightning speed, often in direct response to user feedback.

And guess what? Next week, your name could be in this list! Just 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 .