Welcome to week 12 in Usability & Productivity! Despite all the awesome improvements I’m about to share, there are EVEN MORE that I wasn’t able to announce this week because they’re not quite done yet! But In the coming weeks, some very nice fixes and improvements are going to land. Without further ado…

New Features

Mouse settings now fully support using libinput as the backend (KDE bug 350688, Implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by Roman Gilg):



Hidden files on Windows partitions are now properly marked as hidden (and are no longer visible by default) when viewed in Dolphin (KDE bug 171537, implemented in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by Roman Inflianskas)

Bugfixes

Fixed a few bugs that could cause Spectacle’s Rectangular Region selection box to jump around (KDE Phabricator revisions D11598 and D11704, fixed in Spectacle 18.04.0, authored by Tao Guo)

Fixed a bug causing the Shift+Home/End keyboard shortcuts to not work while editing the name of a file or folder on the Desktop (KDE bug 392318, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Kai Uwe Broulik)

Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to lock up when an app updates its window’s title very rapidly (KDE bug 365317, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.13.0, authored by David Edmundson)

Fixed a bug causing the weather widget’s BBC source to not fetch data after the BBC changed the URL on us (KDE Bug 392510, fixed in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Friedrich Kossebau)

UI Polish & Improvements

In Open/Save dialogs, the context menu’s “Show Containing Folder” action now highlights and scrolls to the selected files in the window that appears (KDE bug 392330, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by me, Nate Graham)

Kdenlive icons now look good in HiDPI mode (KDE bug 390104, improved in KDE Applications 18.04.0, authored by Andrew Crouthamel)

Improved the look of Task Manager tooltip previews (KDE bug 390457, improved in KDE Frameworks 5.45, authored by Fredrik Höglund):



Made it slightly easier to figure out how to change the wallpaper by adding a wallpapery icon to the “Configure Desktop” menu items (KDE Phabricator revision D11253, improved in KDE Plasma 5.13, authored by me, Nate Graham):



Icons and text in Dolphin’s Places panel are now always perfectly aligned with one another with any font and size, including the common Noto Sans 11 (KDE bug 390771, improved in KDE Applications 18.08.0, authored by Scott Harvey)

Improved the appearance of the category and subcategory headers in System Settings (KDE bug 392340, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by me, Nate Graham):



The logout screen’s buttons are now more readable against a dark background (KDE bug 382264, improved in KDE Plasma 5.12.4, authored by Radek Hušek):



Every week, you can see the omissions being remedied and the papercuts being healed one by one. We’re on a mission to make KDE Plasma the best graphical desktop on planet Earth. There’s a lot of ground to make up, and we need your help! Climb on board and be a part of something truly magnificent.

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