KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 64

Week 64 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative has arrived, and I think you’ll see why this week needed two posts. I’ve already published a guest post about the lock and login screen tweaks for Plasma 5.16 , but we’ve got much, much more:

New Features

• Konsole can now do arbitrary grid-like splits (Tomaz Canabrava, Maciej Niedbdalski, and Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.08.0):
  
• Plasma Vaults can now be locked and unlocked directly from within Dolphin (Ivan Čukić, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Yakuake’s tabs and titlebar are now much more customizable (Lionel Chauvin, Yakuake 3.0.6)
• Spectacle now has a new -c command-line argument that will copy the screenshot to the clipboard instead of saving it to a file when using background mode (Karlo Dautović, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
• Dolphin now lets you add custom columns in Details View for video framerate and aspect ratio (Kochih Wu, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When dragging apps to the Application Dashboard’s favorites grid, the app now stays in the location that you drag it to (Tranter Madi, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
• The System Settings page for the SDDM login screen now correctly prompts you to apply or discard unsaved changes after changing the auto-login settings then then navigating away (Tigran Gabrielyan, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
• The KWin window manager now consumes less CPU time when when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver (Erik Kurzinger, KDE Plasma 5.12.9)
• Plasma Vaults are now sorted by name in the widget (Ivan Čukić, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The System Settings KRunner plugins page now gives focus to the search field by default (Jayesh Bhoot, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Wireguard support is now complete (Bruce Anderson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When opened standalone, the Default Applications , Screen Locking , and Per-Activity Power Settings pages now have sensible default window sizes (Tigran Gabrielyan, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Thumbnail previews are no longer generated for files in encrypted vaults, which could be read when the vault was closed (Ivan Čukić, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework are now smarter about automatically inserting closing quotation marks (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Fixed a bug that could cause code folding to fold too much in Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework (Nibaldo González, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
  
• Fixed the root cause of the issue periodically causing error messages with the text “A folder named /home/user/.cache/kioexec/krun/6746_0/ already exists.” to appear (David Faure, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• The Baloo file indexing service no longer crashes when encountering .spx files that do not contain XML data as expected (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Spectacle’s “Quit after copy” feature now actually remembers the image in the clipboard (Karlo Dautović, KDE Applications 19.04.0 when run on KDE Plasma 5.15.4 or later)
• Dolphin’s settings window now prompts you to apply or discard unsaved changes when closing it (Amish Naidu, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• You can now show and hide the desktop with the Meta+D keyboard shortcut (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When using double-click mode, single-clicking on a file in the save dialog now focuses the filename field so you can edit the name (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• The KDE save dialog now binds the return key to the “Save” Button even when the file list has focus (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• The KDE open/save dialogs now default to showing Detailed Tree View (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework now show a little lock icon on the corner for read-only documents (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
  
• Dolphin’s information panel now updates to show the hovered item when that item is in an inactive split view (Méven Car, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• Dolphin tooltips that contain clickable URLs no longer extend to be excessively long; the URL is elided in the middle instead (Mikhail Krutov, 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 .