KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 73

Week 73 in Usability & Productivity initiative is here! We have all sorts of cool stuff to announce, and eagle-eyed readers will see bits and pieces of Plasma 5.16’s new wallpaper “Ice Cold” in the background!

New Features

• Kate now has a menu item with standard keyboard shortcut (ctrl+0) to reset the font size to the default value (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
• On X11, when Dolphin is already running and another app asks it to display some folder, it now opens a new tab to show that folder rather than creating a whole new window (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Spectacle can now take fullscreen screenshots on 4k screens (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE plasma 5.12.9)
• The Home button in Discover’s toolbar now activates on click-and-release, not on click (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• More fixes and polish for the upcoming Notifications rewrite in Plasma 5.16: The Panel no longer shows a blue icon when there are active notifications on the screen ; KDE Connect notifications are now configurable ; notifications from the Snap version of the Discord app now appear properly ; when plugging in the mouse is configured to disable the touchpad, the notification shown when this happens now removes itself when the mouse is unplugged ; apps that send multiple notifications but don’t tell Plasma their app IDs are now correctly grouped in the history; “Show even in Do Not Disturb Mode” now works for Spectacle ; play/pause/more info buttons in file transfer notifications now have better spacing ; and consecutive identical notifications are no longer discarded, which was causing various issues (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0
• Kate and other KTexteditor-based apps no longer reset the syntax highlighting method when saving remote files using the sftp:// or fish:// protocol (Nibaldo Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
• Horizontal separators in Kirigami and QML-based user interfaces now have an equal amount of space above and below them (Marco Martin and Filip Fila, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
  
• Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again has the top item selected by default (Michal Humpula, Kate 19.08.0)
• Akonadi-using apps like KMail can now automatically and silently recover from the dreaded “Multiple Merge Candidates” error (Daniel Vrátil, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The System Settings page to configure Baloo now has an improved user interface (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Huge improvements for font display: slight RGB hinting is now the default , Plasma no longer overrides distro font rendering defaults , and also the font settings page in System Settings now displays the actual value instead of a confusing “Vendor Default” label (Bhushan Shah and Julian Wolff, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Menus and combobox pop-ups in QML-and Kirigami-based apps no longer animate their highlight effects when hovered over, bringing them into visual consistency with their QWidgets equivalents (Björn Feber, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
• When you use Kate or other KTextEditor-based apps to save over another file, they now delegate the confirmation prompt to the file dialog itself , so there’s never a double prompt or an overwrite without confirmation (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.59
• When using the Breeze Light or Dark themes, the panel now reads accent, highlight, and hover colors from the active color scheme rather than using hardcoded colors (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
  
• File metadata in decimal form now limits the decimals to three significant figures for readability (Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
• Kolourpaint now uses a better icon when using a dark theme (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.60)

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!

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