If you’re celebrating Easter, we’ve got a gift for you: week 67 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! And if not… well you get it anyway!

New Features

• The KWin window manager now has initial support for using the proprietary NVIDIA driver in a Wayland session (Erik Kurzinger, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• System Settings pages written in QML that are opened standalone now have the correct window height by default. This fixes the Fonts, Workspace Behavior, Mouse, Touchpad, and Launch Feedback pages (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
  
• Fixed a common Plasma crash (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Kate and other tabbed editors using the KTextEditor framework no longer display the dreaded “ambiguous shortcut” warning dialog when switching tabs with the ctrl+page up/page down keyboard shortcuts because the “move insertion point to top/bottom of viewport” shortcuts have been changed to be alt+home/end (Cnristoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• Fuel consumption conversion in KRunner now produces the correct results (Michal Malý, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• Fixed a regression in dolphin that was preventing the “Create New” button from being added to the toolbar (me: Nate Graham, and Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
• Mobile phones plugged into your computer no longer show two identical “Open with File Manager” items in the Device Notifier (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.08.0):
  

User Interface Improvements

• It’s now possible to replace a widget with an alternative one when in panel edit mode (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Discover now lets you force-quit it if you try to quit while it’s doing stuff–of course, it’s up to you to live with the consequences! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The Login Screen (SDDM) System Settings page got a visual overhaul (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• It’s no longer necessary to check the “Force Rasterization” checkbox in Okular’s print settings to enable the page scaling options (Michael Weghorn, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Kipi Plugins is a set of app plugins for manipulating images.  They use libkipi which is released as part of KDE Applications.  It used to get standalone releases and was then moved to be part of Digikam releases.  Since Digikam 6 they have been deprecated by Digikam in favour of their new plugin framework DPlugins.  While in KDE Frameworks the Purpose Framework is another newer project covering similar features.

However Kipi Plugins are still supported by KDE apps KPhotoAlbum, Gwenview, Spectacle so they shouldn’t disappear yet.

I’ve made a new release available for download now.

https://download.kde.org/stable/kipi-plugins/

Versioned 5.9.1 because it is little changed from the previous release done inside Digikam which was 5.9.0.

Tagged commit b1352149b5e475e0fbffb28a7b5fe13503f24dfe

Sha256 Sum: 04b3d31ac042b901216ad8ba67dafc46b58c8a285b5162b51189833f6d015542

Signed by me Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>

This will become part of KDE Applications in its next release scheduled for August and will follow the KDE Applications version numbers.

by

One of the things which makes Plasma so attractive is the officially supported option to customize also the style, and that beyond colors and wallpaper, to allow users to personalize the look to their likes. And designers have picked up on that and did a good set of custom designs (store.kde.org lists at the time of writing 454 themes).

Intended changes and unintended changes

In the 11 years since Plasma was released first (January 11, 2008) there has been some evolution of the theming options. Sadly also sometimes regressions in the support of older options were introduced, mainly in the early phase of Plasma 5 when code was ported to QtQuick 2 and the new default theme Breeze did not expose the regression or even triggered some changes for its special needs or for simplifications it allowed.

Given Breeze as default was pleasing to most, and possibly some alternative theme designers were lost during the longer phase from a pleasing KDE4 to an again pleasing Plasma 5, and new theme designers made their themes directly matching latest Plasma 5 Theme support, the piled-up regressions were not a real issue for those contributing.

Well, not a real issue unless on started to restore an old theme like “Fluffy Bunny”. And was wondering why it looks broken. And then wondering the same while playing with all the other old themes still available on store.kde.org.

So much partially good artwork being broken made my heart bleed, and in the absence of own designer abilities it was time to document the regressions as well as fix some code where possible to restore previous variability.

Teaching Porting to Plasma 5

So, theme designers, please find a a new page on techbase.kde.org about Porting Themes to latest Plasma 5. It lists the changes known so far and what to do for them. Please extend the list if something is yet missing. One might test the fixes in the code against one’s themes with latest development versions of Plasma using Live images.

Fresh old Air & Oxygen

And even the Oxygen & Air themes, the default Plasma themes during KDE4 times, while being maintained as official themes part of current Plasma releases, had suffered some small regressions (e.g. analog clocks hands rotation point or progressbar height). No more, with Plasma 5.16 the visual experience of Oxygen & Air should be closer to the original.

Luxury on the borders results in bad looks

Sadly there is one thing which is not so easy to fix: Plasma code now assumes for any frames (like with borders of panels & pop-up dialogs) that the actual border visuals are negligible and the margin from the outside to the content is the same, with border on the side enabled or not. With luxurious decorated borders (like Fluffy Bunny or Spoons Original) this sadly results in bad looking bigger margins on sides where the border is disabled (see details). Which is sad especially given that High DPI display actually would allow more fanciness, even more when in the future Flat design gets replaced by whatever new trend. My passive dreams & hopes are on for Plasma 6

Separating Plasma 5 compatible themes on store.kde.org

And while there now is a list of things to do to make old themes work again, many themes on store.kde.org no longer are maintained. There is talk about separating those, e.g. at time of Plasma 5.16 release, so there would be a clean list of working and maintained themes for latest Plasma 5.

As you can read in the official Creator 4.9.0 release announcement, Qt Creator now uses the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework for providing the generic highlighting.

This is a nice step for the wider adoption of this MIT licensed part of the KDE Frameworks.

And this is not just an one-way consumption of our work.

The framework got actively patches back that make it more usable for other consumers, too, like Kate ;=)

If you want concrete examples, take a look at:

• D18982: prevent assertion in regex load
• D18996: Fix building with namespaced Qt
• D18997: Add functions returning all definitions for a mimetype or file name
• D19200: Return sorted definitions for file names and mime types
• D19215: Install DefinitionDownloader header

I hope this cooperation will continue in the future. I thank the people working on Qt Creator that made this integration possible. I hope the initial effort will pay of with less code for them to maintain on their own and more improvements of the framework for all users.

Last week I flew to Brussels for EuroLLVM followed by Bristol for ACCU.

At both conferences I presented the work I’ve been doing to make it easier for regular C++ programmers to perform ‘mechanical’ bespoke refactoring using the clang ASTMatchers tooling. Each talk was prepared specifically for the particular audience at that conference, but both were very well received. The features I am working on require changes to the upstream Clang APIs in order to enable modern tooling, so I was traveling to EuroLLVM to try to build some buy-in and desire for those features.

I previously delivered a talk on the same topic about AST Matchers at code::dive 2018. This week I presented updates to the tools and features that I have worked on during the 6 months since.

One of the new features I presented is a method of debugging AST Matchers.

Part of the workflow of using AST Matchers is an iterative development process. For example, the developer wishes to find functions of a particular pattern, and creates and ever-more-complex matcher to find all desired cases without false-positives. As the matcher becomes more complex, it becomes difficult to determine why a particular function is not found as desired.

The debugger features I wrote for AST Matchers intend to solve that problem. It is now possible to create, remove and list breakpoints, and then enable debugger output to visualize the result of attempting to match at each location. A simple example of that is shown here.

When using a larger matcher it becomes obvious that the process of matching is short-circuited, meaning that the vertically-last negative match result is the cause of the overall failure to match the desired location. The typical workflow with the debugger is to insert break points on particular lines, and then remove surplus breakpoints which do not contribute useful output.

This feature is enabled by a new interface in the Clang AST Matchers, but the interface is also rich enough to implement some profiling of AST Matchers in the form of a hit counter.

Some matchers (and matcher sub-trees) are slower/more expensive to run than others. For example, running a matcher like `matchesName` on every AST node in a translation unit requires creation of a regular expression object, and comparing the name of each AST node with the regular expression. That may result in slower runtime than trimming the search tree by checking a parameter count first, for example.

Of course, the hit counter does not include timing output, but can give an indication of what might be relevant to change. Comparison of different trees of matchers can then be completed with a full clang-tidy check.

There is much more to say about both conferences and the tools that I demoed there, but that will be for a future log post. I hope this tool is useful and helps discover and debug AST Matchers!

Today I did run again into an old problem: You need to archive a lot small and large files inside a single Git repository and you have no support for Git LFS available. You did this several year and now you ended up in a state where cloning and working with the repository is unbearable slow.

What now? Last time I did run into that, I archived the overfull repository to some “rest in peace” space and used git filter-branch to filter out no longer needed and too large objects from a repository copy that then will replace the old one for daily use.

There are a lot of guides available how to use git filter-branch for that. All variants I ever used were complex to do and did take very long. Especially if you need several tries to get a sane set of stuff you want to remove to gain enough space savings.

This time, I searched once more and stumbled on the BFG Repo-Cleaner. And yes, it does what it promises on the web site and it seems to be trusted enough to be advertised by e.g. GitHub, too.

Just following the steps described on their landing page allows to shrink your stuff nicely and without a lot of round-trip time.

If you still are just in the “experimenting” phase to see which space decrease one can archive with which file size filter (or which files you want to purge by removing them from master before running the tool), I recommend to swap the step

git reflog expire –expire=now –all && git gc –prune=now –aggressive

with just

git reflog expire –expire=now –all && git gc –prune=now

to not wait potential hours for the aggressive GC. For me that was good enough to get some estimate of the later size for my experiments before I settled to some final settings and did the real run.

And as always, if you touch your Git history: Do that only if you really need to, keep backups, check carefully that afterwards the repository is in some sensible state (git fsck --strict is your friend) and inform all people using that repository that they will need to do a full new clone.

Changing routines to stay productive

As a remote worker, you need to find ways to keep productivity levels high. No matter how exciting your work is, there are times in which you struggle with keeping up the pace. Looking back at my performance during the last couple of weeks of January and first few days of February, I discovered that I was getting into a productivity valley, which never happened to me after coming back from a couple of weeks vacation. I decided to do something about it before the issue had any impact in my overall performance.

• I have a little place back in my home island, La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain, where I can work comfortably. So when I feel I am not being very productive at home, I move there for a couple of weeks. It does work well for me. I decided though to try something different this time.
• I go to the office in Manchester, UK several times a year. Those weeks there are intense and change whatever dynamic I am in. I spent there a few days early in February already but I decided to go back again the last week of March.
• Once in a while, specially on Fridays, I go to coworking spaces in Málaga, specially when I am at home over three weeks in a row. This past month of March I decided to join The Living Room coworking space, in Málaga. My idea is to work there once or twice a week the coming three months. So far the experience is positive.
• The first week of March, after the Embedded World 2019 and the CIP Technical Steering Committee face to face meeting in Nürnberg, I went to Prague for a week. I rented an apartment there and a hot desk at Impact Hub coworking space. The trip gave me the opportunity to break the routine while enjoying some of the many activities that the city offers. The classical music, opera, jazz and blues scene in Prague is rich. There are plenty of theaters and clubs to go to every night. Live music is one of my passions and Prague is perfect for it.

Impact Hub Prague is a big and busy coworking space with great facilities. It is maybe too crowded for people that have concentration difficulties or many video chats, but very good for entrepreneurs and freelancers. Those who have a fixed desk there work in more quiet areas. People were very friendly and I could have a productive week.

I am in the process of slightly changing some well established routines like starting a little earlier, reducing the lunch time and trying to finish a little earlier when working from home. I might also increase the amount of time I am working standing up.

It seems that all these measures are working so far although I will need a few more weeks to confirm this impression.

Scale Summit 2019

On Friday 29th March I attended to Scale Summit 2019 in London, UK, an unconference that works under Chatham House rules bringing together “professionals from the operations and software development communities who have a particular interest in scalable, high performance systems “.

It is a fantastic event. One of the best ones I’ve been to. This is the second time I have attended and will not be the last one. The quality of the discussions is very high and people go there to learn instead of to shine, sharing experiences and asking questions.

FOSS North 2019

I was invited by the FOSS North organizers to give a talk on Tuesday 9th April. This is a 2 days, 260 participants and two tracks event, that takes place in Gothenburg, Sweden. This was the fourth edition and the next one, at the same venue, will take place on March 30th and 31st 2020.

It was my first participation at this event and my first time in Gothenburg. FOSS North is well organized, vibrant, it takes place in good facilities, there were great speakers (Adrian DeGroot, Chris Simmonds, Mirko Boehm, Molly de Blanc, Michael Kerrisk, Chris Lamb, etc), some interesting talks, the food was great… and I liked Gothenburg. There will be videos available from every session. The speakers dinner was fun and interesting, which is not always the case.

Thanks Johan for the invitation and thanks Codethink Ltd for sponsoring my trip there.

I would recommend you to watch Mirko Boehm’s keynote “Open Source, Standards Development and Patents in Europe“. I found specially interesting the view of Open Source projects from the standardization bodies point of view he provided. It is always good to receive criticism with somebody else’s eyes. Specially controversial was the point referred to meritocracy.

I heard for the very first time about Property-based testing, which is an alternative approach to Example Based Testing (like Unit Testing). I believe it is kind of a structured way of doing Fuzz Testing. I will read more about this topic because I liked it. I initially find it specially useful for regulated environments (Contract Driven Development).

I got a good amount of feedback about my talk, which had a couple of controversial slides for some. I will deliver this talk again (in Spanish), this coming month of May at OpenSouthCode. Some of the comments will help me to improve the talk, which is always a good thing. I will link the video to the Conference section of this site as soon as it is available. Meanwhile I have published the slides already.

As part of the Community Day, on Sunday 7th, I attended to the KDE workshop driven by Adrian DeGroot. I took with me my RPi3 and RPi screen with Plasma Mobile and my 10″ Lenovo tablet with openSUSE Tumbleweed and Plasma. Adrian took his 7″ device, also with Plasma so the room looked like an embedded oriented workshop.

There were several other activities from different communities in different locations across Gothenburg that same Sunday. Several companies and non-profit organizations hosted these workshops. This warming up activity was considered a success so it will take place again in the 2020 edition. There were a few booths from sponsors at the event. Most of the companies present were recruiting.

If you are in Scandinavia, think about attending to this event next year. It is a good one.

In May I will attend to OpenSouthCode and J On The Beach, both in Málaga area. See you there!

• multi-screen fix: unload properly explicit screen docks when their screen is not available any more

You can find Latte at Liberapay if you want to support,    

• Latte Dock 
• Latte Spacer
• Window Title Applet
• Window Buttons Applet
• Window AppMenu Applet
• Latte SlideShow 
• Latte Window Colors
• Dock and TopBar, Latte layout

Last month, I attended FOSSASIA’s annual conference which was held in Singapore. This conference was a collection of amazing, life-changing experiences. It was my first experience as a speaker and it taught me so much about the open-source culture. This summit took place from 14th March to 17th March in the beautiful city of Singapore. This was my second foreign trip as well. First one was to San Francisco as a part of the Student Startup Exposure Program.

My flight was scheduled for 12th March from Jaipur and had a layover at Chennai for 5 hours. I reached the Changi Airport in the early morning of 13th. This airport was quite scenic and is also ranked as the top airport in the world.

The Changi airport has fairly good transportation connectivity, I took an MRT to Bendemeer where I was going to spend my next few days. I stayed at a hostel located in the heart of the city. It was the first time I was staying in a shared room with 12 others, from different countries. Luckily, I found some other participants and speakers of Fossasia Summit staying in the same hostel (I was not the only techie here, yay!). It was a leisure day, so I planned to go sightseeing around the city with my new friends. We went to the Marina Bay, Night safari and Gardens by the bay. Being a vegetarian was quite hard there as I could barely find some vegetarian food around. There was a lot of seafood available. It was a hot day and we finally reached the hostel back.

Next day, I had my breakfast early and reached The Lifelong Learning Institute where the Summit was organized. There were many talks on various tracks from the experts. I was more interested in Cloud, Containers, DevOps and Science and Education tracks.  There were quick lightning talks on variety of topics.

The next day was similar to the first,  I spent a lot amount of time interacting with the developers around the world and got to know about many new techs and some interesting projects. Another thing I love about these conferences is the goodies and swags, I got a lot of goodies of various open source organizations And finally, I found some vegetarian food to eat. In the evening, we decided to explore the Singapore city more and went to Sentosa Island. The transportation facility was really great, the whole city was well-connected. With some fun and adventures, we finally came back to the hostel.

Next day, there were talks on Artificial Intelligence and Web Technologies, I attended a few of them. A UNESCO Hackathon was also organized, I also participated in that whose theme was Indigenous languages. We formed a team of five and built a crowd-sourced corpus generator for translating Indigenous language sentences to English.

It was day 3 of the conference and I was very excited as I was going to deliver my talk “GCompris – The open source Educational suite”. I ended up speaking faster than I planned to, leaving more than enough time for a QA round. My previous contribution with the project as a part of Google  Summer of Code student helped me to answer questions related to tech stacks and how to contribute. Received some suggestions for the improvements of the current activities and met someone who was interested in translating activities in the Thai Language. Also, I met Shantanu Tushar and Sinny Kumari who are KDE contributors.

After the talk, I interacted with many more people and it was a great overall experience for me. Later, we again started working on our Hackathon project and made good progress there. After a lot of hacking and interactions we went to the market for some shopping, exploring streets and dinner.

The best part of our hostel was rooftop, where I used to go at night to interact with people all around the world who were staying there. I made some new friends from Canada, Russia, and Singapore. Also, I met a person from India who was working as an agile DevOps Coach at Singapore. He took me to the nearest Gurudwara where I had my dinner.

It was the last day of the conference and I was also excited about the results of the Hackathon. And to our surprise, we won three out of five categories in the Hackathon. We got the first position in AI Dev and Audience attraction category and third place in Cloud Tech(Yayyyy!!). It was really a great moment of joy for us. We got some electric Gadgets including Bluetooth Speaker, earphones and badges. We also got the SUSI.ai and PSLab which are the open source hardware projects of Fossasia.

After 4 days of  amazing experince and involvement with open-source, the conference finally came to end with its closing ceremony.

My flight back to home was on the 19th March. First leg was from Singapore to Bangkok and after two and half hours of layover, my final leg was to Jaipur. I had mixed emotions on landing in Jaipur with fresh memories of Singapore and my pending college assignments which I was going to do as soon as I return home

Fossasia Summit was a great trip and learning experience for me. I hope I can make more trips like this in the future!

End of last month I attended the KDE privacy goal sprint in Leipzig. Together with Sandro I continued to look into tooling for identifying and fixing insecure HTTP links, an issue I have written about earlier already. The result of this can be found in D19996.

Identifying insecure links

The first tool we built is httpcheck, a scanner for http: URLs in whatever files you point it to. This is optimized for high speed and therefore doesn’t do any online validation etc.

Obviously something like this can never be perfect, so this has a few features to deal with the common problems we encounter:

• There is a global exclusion list for known URIs as e.g. used in XML namespaces, where the http: is part of the identifier and not resolved as a network address (see also the last post on this issue).
• There is an exclusion list for services known to not support transport encryption (yes, those still exist in 2019), as well as for URLs that would just produce an unmanageable amount of warning noise for now (that’s mainly the gnu.org addresses commonly found in license headers).
• Like other code checkers, this supports inline and per module overrides to suppress warnings. It is for example quite important to not touch code that deals with adjusting http: to https: URLs and therefore might validly contain parts of what seems to be an insecure URL.

A tool like this is mainly useful to prevent new issues from being introduced, and there’s two ideas on how to deploy this:

• As a unit test injected by ECM into all projects (as it’s currently done for the appstream test, and that’s also why the code for this is in ECM).
• As a commit hook, similar to the license checks run at commit time.

Before rolling this out we need to fix the current code base first though, to not drown in warnings and test failures.

Automatically fixing insecure links

And that brings us to the second tool, httpupdate, which is is meant to automate the migration to https: URLs. This will consume the same overrides and exclusion list as httpcheck, so it wont touch anything explicitly marked as intentionally using http:. It also doesn’t simply replace http: by https: but it first validates that the corresponding service actually supports secure connections.

A side-effect of this is that it also identifies dead links or no longer existing services, and therefore helps to maintain e.g. our documentation.

Of course this is also imperfect, the result always needs manual review, but it nevertheless massively speeds up the process compared to doing all this manually.

Impact

How much does this help with the overall privacy for our users though? How often do you click on links in the documentation, CMake output, or let alone in license headers? And even then, doesn’t HSTS enabled browsers and properly configured web servers redirect to secure connections anyway? In most cases this is probably true, and the practical impact is limited.

However during the test runs of the tools at the sprint we found two possible data leaks this way (one when using an URL shortening service, one for a pastebin service), among hundreds of probably less impactfull insecure links. So I think this is worth it even if it just helps us to spot a potential high impact issue among the many harmless ones.

Contribute

As mentioned above, before it makes sense to roll out the continuous checks for this we need to fix the current state. That means going through all repositories and see what these tools find, fix things and improve the tools and their exclusion lists on the way. So there’s plenty of opportunity to help :)

Here’s week 66 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and some major features have landed! Check it out:

New Features

• The label width/grid size for files and folders on the desktop is now user-configurable, allowing small icons to have small labels if that’s what suits you (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• Dolphin and other KDE apps now have the ability to display file creation dates on Linux when using version 2.28 or later of the glibc library (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• It’s now possible to open Kate with the insertion point at a user-specified position, using syntax like kate file://foo.txt?line=123&column=456 (Gleb Popov, KDE Applications 19.04.0 with KDE Frameworks 5.58)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Fixed a bug that could cause the Baloo file indexer to never stop indexing when configured to exclude a particular folder but include a sub-folder inside of it (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
• Desktop item labels are now always sharp and crisp (Fabian Vogt and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.9):
  
• For Plasma 5.12.x and 5.15.5, the minimum width of desktop items is now a little bit smaller and more reasonable (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.9):
  
• The System Monitor widgets’ configuration pages now accurately display the actual status of what’s visible/checked and what’s not (Pavel Mars, KDE Plasma 5.15.5)
• The button to mute notification sounds now works anytime, rather than only after you’ve adjusted the volume slider at least once (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.5)
• When using the proprietary NVIDIA driver and Qt 5.13, graphics are no longer often distorted after waking the computer from sleep (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Improved support for changing the brightness on DDC-compatible displays (Dorian Vogel, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When using KDE applications outside of Plasma, file transfers are now displayed in a standalone window (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• When Krusader is installed, using the krarc:/ URL to access compressed files now allows you to use the URL navigator to go back to paths outside of the compressed file (Natsumi Higa, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when tagging multiple files at once (Nicolas Fella, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• When a document open in Kate or any other app using the KTextEditor framework (like KDevelop) is deleted on disk, the message widget alerting you to this fact now has a button allowing you to close it (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
  
• Improved auto-bracket support in Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• In Kate and other apps using the KTextEditor framework, spaces are now correctly inserted when doing multi-line indentation in block selection mode (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• The “Alternatives…” menu item for widgets now has a better icon and text (Bjorn Fëber and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
  
• On Wayland, the Plasma Vault window as well as other system-service-related windows now show the right icon (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.58.0)
• Kate and other apps using the KSyntaxHighlighting framework like KDevelop now do syntax highlighting for Fish shell scripts (Arnd Diestelhorst, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• Dolphin no longer shows “Open With” menu items for empty directories (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
• When navigating using the keyboard, Dolphin now automatically scrolls the view to ensure that selected items are visible (Tranter Madi, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

Finally I’d like to give a shout-out to KDE developer Matthieu Gallien, who is developing KDE’s next-generation music player Elisa, which is shaping up nicely. I’m close to using it as my daily driver. Give it a try via KDE’s nightly Flatpak builds, or compile it from source.

Eagle-eyed readers will no doubt notice many visual papercuts, but they’re being worked on!

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!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Dear digiKam fans and users, after the first digiKam 6 release published in February 2019, we received lots of user feedback to consolidate this important stage of this project started 2 years ago. We are proud to quickly announce the new digiKam 6.1.0, with plenty of new features and fixes. The New Plugins Interface “DPlugins” With 6.0.0, digiKam project has already left the KIPI plugins support and embedded all tools as native solutions without easly permitting to customize and extend the application.

During my web site upgrade, I reviewed the old stuff I had hosted on my long gone web sites but still archived here locally. An interesting thing I stumbled on are the KDE 3 -> 4 porting screenshots of Kate I saved in 2005.

They actually show pretty nicely how far we have gone since 2005 with our development stack.

The KDE 3 -> 4 transition was a large hassle. It did take weeks of work just to get Kate back into an usable state.

We first started with some trivial KTextEditor container (a mini KWrite) for the porting to get KTextEditor at all doing something. That started out with something that even had no menu or toolbars working:

This evolved after two days into a kind of working KWrite port (icons still randomly missing):

After the KTextEditor part did work “reasonable”, we started with Kate:

And ended up with an initial ported prototype three days later:

And after that a long time of actual polishing for KDE 4.0 did start. Kate was actually one of the first ported applications during the KDE 3 -> 4 transition.

The KDE 4 -> KF5 transition was much nicer, even thought the Frameworks split did cost a lot of time and resources. But the actual changes to the application code bases were not that radical.

And where did we end up with this ~14 years later? Actually, just here:

It is still recognizable the same application, thought I hope some progress is visible :=)

Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

I have been quiet for some months but during those months, Elisa has seen many improvements by existing and new contributors and a new stable version is planned in the coming weeks.

I will publish some blog posts about the many new features implemented in the master branch.

Support for libVLC

Today, I would like to talk about the added support for playing audio through libVLC.

One of my goals had been to be able to offer the best possible first impression when starting Elisa. With the current stable version, flatpak builds and Windows builds are not able to support many audio formats. This is a pretty bad first experience.

The big advantage of using libVLC (except the API is nice and easy to use) is the ability to easily bundle the support for many audio formats. Thanks a lot to the VideoLAN project for their work.

Support for progress bar on Plasma Desktop taskbar entries

Elisa has long had support for showing track progress when playing on Windows platform.

The next stable version will also be able to show progress when running inside Plasma workspace.

Progress bar on Plasma workspace

Improved party mode

Elisa has been featuring a party mode since 0.3 release. It is now also featuring a simplified playlist view.

Improved party mode

In party mode, one is now able to switch to any track by just clicking on it. This is especially nice for laptops with touchscreen. Anybody can quickly switch to a specific track by a simple touch.

Conclusion

Quite some other features are already ready. They will be the subject of other posts.

There are still some features that are still under review for the next stable release. This is the main reason no firm date are currently set for the next release.

I would like to be able to make the best possible release. In order to do that, feedback would be very welcome.

The easiest way to do that is by using flatpak or Windows installers produced by the KDE continuous build servers. I now that some distributions also have package built on top of Git.

In the course of its twenty-two years of existence, the KDE community has created an impressive amount of documentation, from user manuals to internal project discussions to developer tutorials. Like any fast-growing garden, there is a tendency for some things to get a bit out of hand when left unattended for some time. It can be easy to get lost in the outgrowth, especially for first time visitors. It’s time to put on the gloves, take out the tools, and do a bit of gardening!

(Documentation Konqi courtesy of the amazing Tyson Tan)

Last month, I had the privilege of coming on board as a documentation specialist to take a closer look at KDE’s developer documentation and to later come up with strategies to make them better than ever. I have talked with some of the community’s developers to get their feedback on some of the areas that need updating or fixing when it comes to technical documentation. But that’s only one part of the story.

Our dev docs are also meant for new developers. That applies to both new contributors in the KDE community as well as external developers who want to use our software, particularly our excellent KDE Frameworks. In that regard, we’re also looking for feedback on the areas where interested budding rockstar coders and passionate KDE contributors are having trouble getting into the community.

Having clear, up-to-date, and relevant documentation goes a long way in encouraging and helping new developers get involved with the community with as little friction as possible. It even helps those already manning the ship become familiar with other parts of our software they may not have used before. I would love to hear some thoughts and suggestions, especially from interested KDE hackers, so let me know in the comments below.