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This Week in Plasma: Emoji Resizing

Saturday, 1 August 2026  |  Nate Graham and John Veness

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

…but before we start, here’s a quick reminder that we’ve entered the last week to submit your proposal for the next KDE Goals cycle! If you’re not ready to champion a goal, you can still get involved by joining one of the existing proposals as a contributor or supporter.

And now, without further ado…

In addition to the headliner feature and expected UI improvements and bug fixes, this week features some promising technical and performance improvements. Have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now make the emojis in the Emoji Selector window bigger or smaller. (Jason Uithol, plasma-desktop MR #3878)

On System Settings’ Display Configuration page, you can now move screens pixel-by-pixel using the arrow keys while in layout editing mode. (Antti Savolainen, kscreen MR #476)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.4

The Emoji Selector window is now always tall enough to accommodate its sidebar without scrolling. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #523090)

Spectacle now detects QR codes in screenshots that you take in such a manner that the main UI is never shown; if you click “Annotate” from the notification about it, the QR code will be detected there. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #521097)

Plasma 6.8

In Spectacle’s settings window, image quality controls are now only available for image types whose quality level is adjustable. (Zhora Zmeykin, spectacle MR #568)

Clarified the instructions on System Settings’s Remote Desktop page a little bit. (Nate Graham, krdp MR #224 and krdp MR #225)

Kup 0.11.0

Modernized the UI for the Kup backup system’s System Tray widget, so now it matches other Plasma widgets that can similarly show multiple items, each with their own actions. (Bharadwaj Raju and Tomáš Hnyk, kup MR #53 and kup MR #54)

New New
Old Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a case where the ksystemstats background service could crash seemingly randomly. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #523562)

Fixed a recent regression that made blank document icons appear in the notification history view. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #522846)

Fixed a bug that could make extremely long words in Plasma tooltips overflow rather than wrapping. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523614)

Fixed a bug that made third-party widgets fail to inhibit power management more than once. (Vincent de Robert, KDE Bugzilla #523605)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a visual glitch where the highlight area for expanded list items in various System Tray widgets would sometimes be too small to fit its contents. (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Bugzilla #506295)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed an issue that could sometimes corrupt very large screenshots taken in Spectacle when they were pasted elsewhere. (Cezar Craciunoiu, spectacle MR #566)

Frameworks 6.29

Opening various windows and dialogs using Kirigami components no longer makes the content scroll into view for no particularly good reason. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Bugzilla #515811)

ddcutil 2.2.8

Fixed multiple issues that could make the powerdevil background process freeze or crash. (Sanford Rockowitz, ddcutil issue #581 and ddcutil issue #587)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Significantly improved performance with external GPUs. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #7101)

You can now change the size (and effective resolution) of virtual screens created for screencasting, rather than them being fixed to a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #512620)

Panel floating-ness can now be changed using Plasma desktop scripting. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #521549)

KWin now recognizes the “Pick up phone” and “Hang up phone” keys on some keyboards, allowing them to be used in keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions. (Méven Car, kwin MR #7892)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a performance issue that could make Plasma freeze when it sent a notification with a lot of emojis in it. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #508070)

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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