This week in Usability & Productivity, part 60

It’s time for week 60 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and this one is positively overflowing with goodies! Will you even be able to handle it? I THINK NOT!!! But read it and see:

New Features

• KMenuEdit now has a search field that can be used to find items in the list if applications (Aidan Sojourner, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  Note that this was a 16 year-old feature request; old enough to drive in many countries!
• Kate (and other apps using the KSyntaxHighlighting framework) can now show highlighting for many more languages inside markdown formatting (Jos van den Oever, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Kate can now optionally show all invisible whitespace characters, not just some (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Kate’s status bar now has a menu with options for the current dictionary language and spellchecking (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Okular now supports editing LaTeX documents in TexStudio (Yuri Chornoivan, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KDE open/save dialogs accessed via the XDG Portal (e.g. in Firefox) now allows multi-selection (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• KWin no longer crashes upon launching a game in certain circumstances (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• While using Discover to install an app that’s available from multiple sources, the sources menu no longer changes its text to null during installation (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• The Picture of the Day wallpaper configuration interface now looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
  
• KInfoCenter’s “Help” button now works again (Harald Sitter, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
• When using the KDE open/save dialogs via the XDG Portal (e.g. in Firefox), trying to overwrite a file now displays a confirmation dialog instead of just silently doing it and then closing (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• In Discover’s sources lists, text containing the repo name now gets elided rather than overlapping the inline buttons when there’s not much room (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
• When Dolphin is unable to create a file or folder whose name is too long, the resulting error message no longer inappropriately resizes the parent window (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
  
• Fixed some visual glitches in Kate, KDevelop and other apps using the KTextEditor framework that could cause dots show up at on deleted lines at the end of a document or make the bottom few pixels of text lines get clipped off (Christoph Cullmann, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when a file in the trash is drag-and-dropped back into the trash (David Hallas, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• The Baloo file indexing service no longer causes crashes in apps used to access tags:/ (Jonathan Marten, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Konsole can once again render bold text (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Fixed a memory leak in Dolphin (David Hallas, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover’s Sources dropdown menu now makes each item look like it’s an exclusive radio button , and uses a better icon for distro sources (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
  Yeah, we’re aware that the Flatpak icon isn’t great either. That will be fixed in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404810
• It’s now possible to switch to an alternative Task Manager from the context menu even when the entire thing is full of tasks and there’s no empty space (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.3):
  
• Category labels in Plasma configuration windows now become multiline strings instead of taking up 100% of the available horizontal space and looking glued to the edges (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.15.3):
  
• The 12/24 hour clock setting in the Digital Clock widget’s settings window now has a sensible user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• A number of Plasma settings windows have been ported to QtQuickControls2 and given a user interface overhaul (Filip Fila and Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Throughout Plasma, the word “Sleep” is now used in place of “Suspend” (Me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  Doesn’t that just look great with our new moon icon, too?!
• KSysGuard’s search field now displays a tooltip when hovering the mouse over it that reveals som if its power and features (Simone Gaiarin, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Kirigami convergent UI toolkit gained a standardized text-field-with-inline-actions component , which means that all of our QML software will soon be able to have a totally consistent look and feel for search fields (Carl Schwan, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
• Kate’s file tree now has a “Show Containing Folder” entry in the document view (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved , and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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