This week in KDE: apps, apps apps!

It’s been a big week for Dolphin with some new features, plus various improvements for other apps. Among them, KDE developer Christoph Cullmann went on a High DPI rampage and and fixed visual glitches in Kate and Okular on Windows when using a High DPI scale factor, and made great progress towards fixing the infamous line glitches in Konsole when using fractional scaling . Though still not quite perfect, it’s much better now.

Beyond that, a bunch of great things are in development which I can’t announce yet, but I guarantee that you’ll like them once they land in the coming weeks!

New Features

• Dolphin’s back and forward buttons can now be clicked-and-held to show a dropdown menu with the full history (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  I know that the downward-pointing arrows in the corners of the buttons are a bit ugly; we’re working on fixing that by making them much less prominent or removing them entirely
• The Places panel visible in Dolphin and other KDE apps now replaces the entries in the old “Recently Saved” section that never worked properly with brand new “Recent files” and “Recent folders” entries that work flawlessly (Meven Car, Frameworks 5.63 and Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• Dolphin now lets you choose all the available options for what will happen when you open an executable script file (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Kate and other text apps using the KTextEditor framework no longer show glitchy horizontal lines when using a fractional scale factor (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.63)
• Fixed a bizarre rendering error with embedded Konsole panels in Kate and other apps when using two high DPI screens (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 19.12.0)
• When Gwenview is used to crop an image with a fixed aspect radio cropper and adjusting the cropper using the top-left or top-right corners, the crop area is no longer one pixel too tall (Alex Miranda, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s “Trim leading spaces” feature no longer removes empty lines (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The System Settings Displays page now has an improved scaling user interface: the slider now exposes the important scale factors of 1.25x and 1.75x but lets you choose a more granular scale factor if you’d like . If you do this on X11, it displays a warning that apps might look weird (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):
  http://s1.webmshare.com/BAv16.webm
• Okular now remembers view mode, zoom settings, and sidebar view settings on a per-document basis (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.9.0)
• Gwenview and Spectacle now have consistent user interfaces for their JPEG quality mode choosers (Felipe Peter, Gwenview and Spectacle and 19.12.0):
  

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .