This Week in Plasma: Press-and-Hold for Alternative Characters
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week something very special landed for Plasma 6.7: the ability to type characters not on your physical keyboard by pressing-and-holding the keys that it does have:
The feature lives in the plasma-keyboard module, so you’ll need to have that installed and turned on in System Settings > Keyboard > Virtual Keyboard. After that, just press-and-hold keyboard keys!
Kristen McWilliam wrote this wonderful feature, and it’ll ship with Plasma 6.7. Kristen has written a whole blog post about it if you want to know more.
But that’s not all! We’ve got some more features, a lot of user interface polishing, and some bug-fixing and performance work. All in all, a good week!
Other notable new features
Plasma 6.7
You can now install custom sound themes from downloaded files. (Sam Crawford, plasma-workspace MR #6115)
The Global Menu widget now shows menus for the active window even if it’s on another screen. This is configurable and can be turned off if you preferred the old behavior. (Trevor Jex, KDE Bugzilla #420418)
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.6.3
Did a round of polish on the “Add Widgets” sidebar to make sure the widget count numbers are always correct and the on-demand delete button disappears the moment it’s no longer useful. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6378)
The “Configure” button on an unconfigured desktop widget now always fits within it, even if it’s very, very small. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6374)
The Clipboard widget no longer shows you QR codes for non-text items, for which they didn’t actually work. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6392)
Browsing through categories in Discover now highlights the active one in the sidebar as expected. (Akseli Lahtinen, discover MR #1280)
Made Spectacle’s magnifier better at being pixel-aligned. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #517274)
Plasma 6.7
In System Tray’s Clipboard and Networks widgets, the normal back button now lets you go back a page, so sub-pages no longer have two back buttons. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6393, plasma-workspace MR #6391, and plasma-nm MR #542)
Plugging in a USB printer now shows only one notification about it, not two. (Mike Noe, print-manager #312)
The “Kate Sessions” KRunner plugin no longer advertises results if Kate isn’t installed or is installed as a Flatpak where its functionality doesn’t currently work — though that could change in the future. (Nicolas Fella, kdeplasma-addons MR #1018)
Quick tiling two adjacent windows now centers them in the available area excluding any panels, rather than squeezing the window closest to the panels. (Anthony Flammia, KDE Bugzilla #484975)
Notable bug fixes
Plasma 6.6.3
Fixed an issue that could prevent the system stats collector from working properly on Raspberry Pi devices. (Ben Murdoch, ksystemstats MR #127)
Fixed a few sources of glitchy behavior when resizing widgets on the desktop. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6373)
Worked around a bug in Samsung LS24D60xU monitors (yes really, a bug in the monitors themselves) that made them turn on and off again in a loop. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516605)
Fixed a stubborn issue causing the Arch/CachyOS updaters’ System Tray context menus to sometimes be mis-positioned. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517093)
It’s now possible to change the keyboard shortcut used for KWin’s Mouse Mark effect. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #501537)
The reset button in System Settings’ SDDM configuration page now resets a few more things it had missed in the past. (Chandradeep Dey, sddm-kcm MR #103)
Plasma 6.7
Implemented a fix in Plasma code to prevent Electron apps’ System Tray icons from all following each others’ settings. This is an upstream bug in Electron which has been fixed, but most Electron apps haven’t yet been updated to include the fix, so for them, this new Plasma-side fix should also stop the issue from happening. (Nekto Oleg, plasma-workspace MR #6400)
wxWidgets 3.3.3
Fixed a bug in the wxWidgets library that broke certain copy-paste operations in wxWidgets apps, such as KiCad and Audacity. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514317)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.6.3
Reduced CPU and GPU load for full-screen windows (also known as “direct scan-out”) for screens using more fractional scale factors. (Błażej Szczygieł, KDE Bugzilla #517264)
Plasma 6.7
Improved the robustness with which sandboxed apps can initiate screencasting and remote desktop requests. (Gabriel Maizo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #526)
If you happen to have multiple GPUs and any of them don’t actually support OpenGL 3D acceleration, this no longer prevents the more capable ones from providing 3D acceleration. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #441409)
How you can help
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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