This week in Usability & Productivity, part 61

In week 61 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, the MVP has got to be the KDE community itself–all of you. You see, Spectacle has gotten a lot of work thanks to new contributors David Redondo and Nils Rother after I mentioned on Reddit a week ago that “ a team of 2-4 developers could make Spectacle sparkle in a month “. I wasn’t expecting y’all to take it so literally! The KDE community continues to amaze. But there’s a lot more, too:

New Features

• On Wayland, the System Settings Libinput touchpad page now allows you to configure the click method, switching between “areas” or “clickfinger” (Atul Bisht, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The slideshow wallpaper now displays the actual images that are inside the folders you’ve chosen (David Redondo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The System Settings Color page now has a search bar and filtering feature so for example you can show only light or dark themes (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• File overwrite operations now copy to a temporary file and then replace the destination file at the very end, so canceling an overwrite in the middle no longer destroys the destination file (Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Spectacle now has an optional setting for Rectangular Region mode to auto-accept the dragged box instead of allowing you to adjust it first and then accept (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Spectacle now lets you change the level of compression for lossy image formats (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Spactacle’s “Capture the current pop-up only” feature now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• When using multiple virtual desktops and saved sessions, the last-used virtual desktop is now remembered and restored when you start up the session again (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• On-screen displays showing volume level etc no longer jerkily flicker as they fade out when using Qt 5.12 ( Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• File open/save dialogs spawned by apps using the XDG portal (such as firefox) now look good when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• Task switcher previews now look good when using a fractional scale factor (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Fixed case where copying files could cause Dolphin to crash (David Hallas, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• The grid items in many new-style System Settings pages now display content that is sharp and crisp rather than blurry (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
  
• Symlinks to mounted NTFS disks are once again visible in Dolphin (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• The scrollable list-within-a-sheet present in the System Settings Languages page no longer escapes from the bounds of the parent view when scrolled (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
  
• An erroneous overwrite warning dialog is no longer presented when using a case-sensitive filesystem and renaming an item by just changing its case (Robert Hoffman, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• In KDE Neon and other distros that default to the Noto Sans font with Noto Symbols2 as a fallback for characters not present in Noto Sans, typing in the lock and login screens’ password field no longer causes the field to become slightly taller (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.57): Next step is to use a different glyph for the black dot, since the one we’re using appears too high in the text field. For more information, see https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1468
• When using two screens, Spectacle’s help text in Rectangular Region mode now shows up in the middle of the primary display, rather than split between the screens (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Konsole once again correctly displays the underline-style cursor (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The logout screen now clearly indicates which option is selected (KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Discover’s sources menu now shows the version number for each different source for that app (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• It’s once again possible to disable the tooltips that show up when hovering over a window decoration button like Maximize, Minimize, Close, etc. (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The Media Frame’s settings window was thoroughly updated and modernized (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Web Browser widget now has a bigger default expanded size and uses an icon that becomes monochrome at small panel heights (Ilya Ostapenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Kate’s “search wrapped” message no longer appears right in the center of the view where it obscures the search result (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• When quitting, Kate no longer annoys you by prompting you to acknowledge files that were modified on disk by something other than you, such as a source control change (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.)
• Text file thumbnails now actually show syntax highlighting for the text inside the thumbnail (Friedrich Kossebau, 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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .