This week, Dan Vratil and me have merged a new feature in KScreen, Plasma’s screen configuration tool. Up until now, when plugging in a new display (a monitor, beamer or TV, for example), Plasma would automatically extend the desktop area to include this screen. In many cases, this is expected behavior, but it’s not necessarily clear to the user what just happened. Perhaps the user would rather want the new screen on the other side of the current, clone the existing screen, switch over to it or perhaps not use it at all at this point.

The new behavior is to now pop up a selection on-screen display (OSD) on the primary screen or laptop panel allowing the user to pick the new configuration and thereby make it clear what’s happening. When the same display hardware is plugged in again at a later point, this configuration is remembered and applied again (no OSD is shown in that case).

Another change-set which we’re about to merge is to pop up the same selection dialog when the user presses the display button which can be found on many laptops. This has been nagging me for quite a while since the display button switched screen configuration but provided very little in the way of visual feedback to the user what’s happening, so it wasn’t very user-friendly. This new feature will be part of Plasma 5.13 to be released in June 2018.