This was a big week for Usability & Productivity. Before I get to the list of improvements we landed, I’d like to make an exciting announcement: we’re scoping out the work to add FUSE support to KIO for remote locations like Samba shares. This should vastly improve the experience of interacting with files on Samba and FTP locations (among others) when using non-KDE software with KDE Plasma. No timelines or promises yet, but it’s now on our radar screens.

Anyway, let’s move onto the list of improvements this week. I think you’re going to like ’em!

The panel’s height is now shown in pixels when being changed, and can be minutely adjusted using the scroll wheel (KDE bug 372364)

Y axis labels for the network widget’s speed graph no longer overlap with the grid lines (KDE Phabricator revision D10183):



Spectacle’s Save button now remembers the most recently used save mode by default (KDE Phabricator revision D10153)

Spectacle’s Save button now defaults to showing “Save As” instead of “Save & Exit” (KDE bug 389614)

Spectacle now uses the correct icon for the “Export Image…” button, and now it also shows up properly when using the Breeze Dark theme (KDE bug 389775):



Dolphin no longer scrolls so quickly in icons mode when there are icons with really long/tall filenames (KDE Phabricator revision D10102)

A huge amount of work went into improving the speed of move and copy operations, especially for many small files (KDE bug 342056, KDE Phabricator revisions D10155, D10256, D10261, and D10282). More is still in the pipeline, too.

You can now put Dolphin’s Terminal pane on any part of the window, not just the top or bottom (KDE bug 362593):



Gwenview’s file rename dialog now excludes the filename extension from the initial selection (KDE Phabricator revision D9632)

When using Gwenview in Full Screen mode, showing the sidebar no longer moves part of the top toolbar (including the “exit Full Screen” button) out of view (KDE bug 387784)

Hitting the Escape key now exits Full Screen mode in Gwenview (KDE bug 305659)

When Gwenview is quit while in Full Screen mode, it no longer re-opens maximized (KDE Phabricator revision D10207)

Gwenview now lets you choose the ICC color rendering intent, rather than hardcoding “Perceptual” (KDE bug 359909):



Konsole gained the ability to blur the background when the window is transparent (KDE bugs 198175):



The standard KWin blur effect has been made blurrier by default (the blur strength is still user-configurable) to offer better out-of-the-box readability for things that use it, like the Application Dashboard (KDE phabricator revision D10180):



Text input in KRunner now always works on Wayland (KDE bug 385693)

The close button on Okular’s pop-up note annotation now uses the correct cursor (KDE bug 384381):



New Breeze icon for Emacs and better icon for Virtualbox (KDE Phabricator revision D10211 and KDE bug 384357):



Kate/KDevelop syntax highlighting now displays correctly for numeric literals with underscores in Python (KDE big 385422)

KSysGuard tabs now correctly show ampersand (&) characters (KDE bug 382512)

Many bug fixes for Discover

Yes folks, all of this happened in ONE WEEK! The volume of contributions is starting to accelerate, and we’re really firing on all cylinders these days. It’s the perfect time to get involved. You don’t need to be a programmer. We’ve got design tasks, bug triaging, promotion, the works! We’re aware that our wiki is a bit scattered and sparse, and we’re working on cleaning that up, too. Since it’s a wiki, please feel free to make improvements!

And there’s more coming, too. I wasn’t able to mention in this week’s status update quite a few exciting fixes that are still going through the review process.

This is an exciting time to be a KDE user or contributor. Feel the energy. Be part of something big. Cynicism and inactivity are easy, but ultimately not satisfying; this is the moment to rise above the pervasive malaise of our time. Climb aboard, and help us build something truly magnificent.