This week in KDE: Okular, Konsole, Plasma, and Wayland

It’s early in the Plasma 5.20 development cycle and some very nice new features landed this week! Various KDE apps–in particular Okular and Konsole–also got new features. It’s a feature-palooza!

Yes, yes, I know what some of you are thinking: “Why are you writing new features while there’s still so much buggy stuff?” In this case, one of the answers is that new features can often solve bugs. For example the Okular work you’ll read about below resulted in a dozen bug reports getting closed! Sometimes you really can have your cake and eat it, too. And of course the Wayland work continues as well…

New Features

Okular’s annotations toolbar has been completely re-done and is now much more discoverable and easier to use ! This improvement has been in development for over a year and I’d like to call attention to Simone Gaiarin for his tremendous work here! (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 1.11.0):

Konsole now shows you a thumbnail preview for image files that you hover your cursor over by default (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 20.08.0):

Middle-click paste now works on Wayland ! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.0)

Changing the screen brightness now smoothly animates the transition rather than jumping from one brightness level to another (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0)

It’s now possible to adjust the balance of individual elements of your speakers (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20):

File choosers displayed by Flatpak apps now implement the ‘choices’ element of the filechooser spec and can therefore be given custom views from the app itself (Michael Weghorn, Plasma 5.20.0)

The Web Browser widget now has a user-configurable zoom setting (Sora Steenvoort, Plasma 5.20.0):

The touchpad cursor speed setting can now be configured on a much more granular basis if desired (Giusy Margarita, Plasma 5.20.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin now shows progress notifications for duplicated files when the duplication takes more than a moment (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.04.2)

When using an alternative input method, Konsole now shows the input method window right below the cursor, where it’s supposed to be (Fuminobu Takeyama, Konsole 20.08.0)

Spectacle no longer gets killed when the notification displayed for the last screenshot disappears (Méven Car, Spectacle 20.08.0)

KRunner’s window now appears in the right place when using a top panel on Wayland (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20)

Folder previews no longer allow the embedded thumbnails to overflow out of the view when they’re very very tall or very very wide (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.08.0)

Dolphin’s free space bar is now correctly sized no matter your font settings (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 20.08.0)

Yakuake no longer unconditionally switches terminals when Shift+Tab is pressed, unless you actually set that as a keyboard shortcut (Maximillian Schiller, Yakuake 20.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s main window has received a visual overhaul, resulting in a new default toolbar layout and hiding the page bar at the bottom of the window by default (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0):

The Properties actions/menu items in Okular and Gwenview are now triggerable using the standard Alt+Return keyboard shortcut, just like in Dolphin (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0 and Gwenview 20.08.0)

Okular now makes it easier to see all of the page sizes in a document with more than one page size (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.0):

It’s now possible to explicitly set the size of System Tray icons (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20):

KRunner’s recent documents feature now uses the same data store as everything else with a “recent documents” feature, making its results more consistent and relevant (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20)

The overwrite dialog now makes it clear when the to-be-overwritten file has a file size that differs by less than a kilobyte (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.71)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. 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 .