Many of us who choose to work with KDE We do it because of how productive it is. The latest versions are not the disaster it was in KDE 4, it has become more fluid and its applications have many functions, and more that are added over time. Your text editor, Kate, does a lot for such software, and this week they told us about a novelty that will make another of their applications more powerful.
To be more specific, the application that will be able to do much more in the near future will be Konsole, and this will be possible thanks to a new system of plugins, which in Spanish would be translated as add-ons. In Kate they allow us, for example, to use XML tools, that by installing them from the same application. What can be done in Konsole we will know in the future. What we can meet today consist of news the project is working on.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Konsole now has a new plugin system that comes with the inaugural SSH connection / bookmark manager plugin! (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.08).
- Press Shift + Delete in the new application System Monitor now it sends a SIGKILL signal to the selected process, as did the old KSysGuard application (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
Here they have mentioned some fixes that are already available in Plasma 5.22.2, but we, as always, are going to add only what is to come:
- Konsole no longer crashes sometimes when the text is expanded or refluxed (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.08).
- Pressing the Meta + V shortcut to display the clipboard history in a pop-up menu no longer crashes Plasma when using certain multiscreen layouts (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22.3).
- In Wayland, window rules related to activities now work (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.3).
- Also in Wayland, the activity switcher sidebar now always works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
- Fixed the most common bug in the Plasma calendar (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.84).
- The SVG search performance in Plasma has been significantly improved, which should translate into slight speed increases and energy efficiency improvements throughout (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.84).
- Deleting global shortcuts from Plasma applets now works correctly (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.84).
- Clicking on the Places Panel entries for locations that have been compulsorily mounted now works correctly (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.84).
Interface improvements
- In Dolphin, pressing the Shift key while the context menu is open to access the semi-hidden action «Delete» now works when a submenu of the context menu is also open (Derek Christ, Dolphin 21.04.3).
- Okular's annotation tool is now a mutually exclusive action, so activating it exits Browse or Text Selection mode, or vice versa (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 21.08).
- Those who don't like Konsole's smart text color selection algorithm can now make use of a new option to always invert the color (which, depending on your terminal color scheme, may not always work, but in those cases, the smart color selection algorithm can be reused, and vice versa) (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.08).
- In Wayland, cursors are no longer pixelated when drawn on a GTK application window while using a high DPI scale factor (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Plasma 5.23).
- Unlabeled disks now have the mount point name (eg "sda1") appended to their generic name, to help identify them especially in case the disks are the same size (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.84).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
Plasma 5.22.3 is coming July 6 And we finally know, KDE Gear 21.08 is coming on August 12th. Frameworks 10 will arrive on July 5.84, and already after the summer, Plasma 5.23 will land with the new theme, among other things, on October 12.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.