KDE Gear ⚙️ is back with exciting new features, performance boosts, and bugfixes for all your favorite KDE apps!

In this release: Kate extends a warm welcome, Dolphin offers you more choices, and a lot of apps serve up hamburgers galore!

Read on for details...

What's New

Dolphin

Dolphin is KDE's powerful file browser. It has supported connecting to and browsing Samba shares for many versions, but now it is also able to manage permissions remotely.

Another new feature is Selection Mode. Hit the spacebar (or tap the hamburger menu and check the Select files and folders checkbox) and a light green bar will appear at the top of the file view (see video). You can now click or tap files and folders and quickly and easily select the ones you want to work with.

Another toolbar will appear at the bottom of the view, giving you options of what you can do with the selected files. For example, if you select only images, it will offer to open them in Gwenview. The moment you select a file Gwenview cannot handle, the options will change to fit the new set of selected files.

Gwenview

Speaking of Gwenview, KDE's feature-rich image and video viewer becomes even... er... feature-richer, as Gwenview now also lets you adjust the brightness, contrast, and gamma of your pictures as you preview them.

Another welcome feature for people who use Free Software graphical editing tools is that Gwenview can now open GIMP's .xcf files.

Kate and KWrite

Kate and KWrite, KDE's text editors, add a welcome window when launched without any files open. The new window lets you create a new file, open an existing file from a list of recent files or anywhere else on the system, and consult the documentation.

But probably the most useful new feature of them all is the Keyboard Macro tool. Activate it in Settings > Configure Kate... > Plugins, and then at the bottom of the Tools menu, you'll find tools to record, save, and play back macros. You can record a long sequence of key presses you need to type often and then hit Ctrl + Alt + K and Kate will type the sequence for you. You can name and save sequences you find particularly useful and use them again and again during different sessions.

In other news, you will find that Kate and KWrite have also adopted KHamburgerMenu for those who prefer to hide their menubars. Because these are large and complex apps, the menubar is still shown by default, like it is in Okular and Kdenlive.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive improves its guide/marker system with custom categories and search filters. Kdenlive also improves its integration with other video applications, and now you can send Kdenlive timelines as backgrounds to the Glaxnimate vector animation utility.

And like many other KDE apps, Kdenlive has also adopted KHamburgerMenu, although by default the regular menu is what you will see the first time you launch the app. If you turn off the normal menubar to gain some vertical real estate, all the menu options will be tucked away under the hamburger menu button in the toolbar.

KDE Connect

KDE Connect links up your phone to your desktop. It allows you to share files and the clipboard, use your phone as a mouse or a remote control, and answer messages from your desktop.

In version 22.12, when you want to reply to a text message using the KDE Connect widget, the text field is now inline rather than in a separate dialog window, making it more convenient to answer when working on your computer.

Kalendar

Kalendar is a new calendaring app from KDE. In the latest update, devs have introduced a new "basic" mode for views. These are ideal for use on low-performance or battery-powered devices, as this mode is not based on swipe gestures like the regular views, but rather presents a more static layout that is easier on the hardware.

Also new is that Kalendar now uses pop-up windows for displaying events, making it easier and more convenient to view and manage your schedule.

Developers have also been busy fixing bugs and improving the performance of Kalendar, so you can expect a smoother and more reliable experience when using the app.

Elisa

Elisa is a friendly music player with a cool, modern look. With version 22.12 Elisa is even friendlier, as it now shows a message explaining what didn't work in case you dragged-and-dropped a non-audio file onto its playlist.

You can also put Elisa into a true full-Screen mode, and the Artist view displays a grid of the artist's albums, rather than a sea of nondescript identical icons.

And all this too

• Kitinerary is KDE's travel assistant. Apart from supporting giving you information about trains, planes and buses, the new version now also supports boats and ferries
• Kmail is an advanced email client. The latest version comes with improvements that make it easier to use encryption for email messages.
• If your keyboard has a "Calculator" button, pressing it will now open KCalc, KDE's full-featured calculator app.
• Spectacle is a screenshot application that is simple by default, but powerful when needed that supports all sorts of screen-capturing modes, annotations, editing, and more. The new version of Spectacle now remembers the last-chosen rectangular region area by default, even across app launches.
• You use Ark to easily create, open, explore and extract files from compressed archives. In version 22.12, Ark adds ARJ to its roster of supported compression formats. Ark has also adopted KHamburgerMenu for a cleaner, simpler look.

Full changelog here.

KDE is All About the Apps

One of the Goals of KDE is to be All About the Apps. This means the KDE Community takes more charge of releasing our own software and delivering it directly to you. Although we fully support distributions that ship our software, KDE Gear 22.12 apps will also be available on these Linux app stores shortly:

If you'd like to help us get more KDE applications into the app stores, support more app stores and get the apps better integrated into our development process, come say hi in our All About the Apps chat room.

KDE Gear ⚙️ 22.08 has Landed!

KDE Gear ⚙️ is the collection of KDE apps, frameworks and libraries that all release new versions at the same time. Version 22.08 brings updates for KDE programs for working, developing your creativity and enjoying your free time without having to submit yourself to extortionate licenses, intrusive advertising, or surrender your privacy.

Discover the most important changes added in the last four months to software designed to make your life better!

What's New

Spectacle

Spectacle is KDE's popular screen-capturing app, that gives you image annotating features, allows you to push your screencaps directly to social media, online image hosting services, instant messaging apps, and much more.

To help you up your screen-capturing game, Spectacle now displays the keyboard shortcuts with the different capture modes right there, in the capture mode selection combobox.

And once you have your image, Spectacle resizes itself in annotation mode, so you don't have to manually make the window big every time you want to annotate a big image. Once you're finished, Spectacle will return to its original size do you can carry on working as normal.

Kalendar

Kalendar is a modern calendar and life-organizer that can get your appointments and list of daily chores from many sources... And, among many other features, the new version includes contacts! As with calendars, you can add address books from a wide variety of sources and view them from a desktop/panel widget. Kalendar can also generate a QR Code for a contact in case you want to share it to a mobile device.

In other news, the calendar view has been enhanced and you can now see subtasks and parent tasks in the task sidebar, making it easier to navigate between them.

KDE Itinerary

Itinerary is KDE's travel assistant that helps you plan your trip; manages your tickets, boarding passes and even health certificates for you, and guides you through airports, train and bus stations, and other transport hubs.

Itinerary developers have been very busy over the last few months and have added an integrated barcode scanner that allows you to import paper tickets into the app, as well as support for flat rate tickets or discount program cards.

To make your travelling easier, train and bus trips can be imported from online journey queries, and, if you are travelling to a meet-up or work do, events can be imported from and exported to the system calendar.

Feel like a detour on a multi-stage trip? No problem: the alternate route option is now available for a single part of a journey.

IMPORTANT: If you are using Itinerary on Android, please note that new updates are NOT available in Google's Play Store any more. Download KDE Itinerary from KDE's F-Droid repo to keep up to date.

Kate/KWrite

Kate and KWrite are KDE's all-important and feature-rich text editors. While KWrite is simple and straightforward, ideal for quick edits without distractions, Kate packs a whole development environment under its hood and includes, multiple panels for a command line terminal, markup preview and project structure, integration with Git, and much more.

Both of Kate and KWrite have recently incorporated a nifty new feature that allows you to place several cursors throughout a document and add text or code in various places simultaneously.

KWrite has added another interesting new feature in that it now supports tabs and screen splitting so you can open several documents at the same time.

Meanwhile, Kate has become easier to use as it now shows its toolbar by default and its menu bar has been re-arranged to make each option less huge and intimidating. In particular, there is now a new "Selection" menu that holds actions which will be applied only to whatever is selected.

Filelight

Filelight let's you see clearly how much room you have in your storage and find out what is taking up so much space! Developers have overhauled Filelight's appearance to modernize its look and, in the process, made the code easier to maintain by porting it to QtQuick.

Another improvement is that the text in Filelight’s tooltips is no longer clipped away at the ends.

Partition Manager

...And talking of storage, Partition Manager, KDE's tool for creating, moving and resizing partitions on your disks, has corrected some glitches that affected text in the information panel, and now shows human-readable text for the amount of time that a disk has been powered on.

Dolphin

Dolphin is KDE's powerful file manager that lets you move, copy, remove files and directories, and connect to remote hosts over SAMBA, SSH, FTP, and more.

Dolphin now lets you sort files also by file extension if you prefer that and you can remove individual items from the "Recent Files" and "Recent Locations" lists in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other places. Also, when you cancel loading a slow folder in Dolphin, the message that appears in the middle of the window does not say "Folder is empty" anymore, but says "Loading canceled" instead.

Elisa

Elisa is KDE's elegant and compact music player, and has improved its accessibility features in this version by making the playlist sidebar once again keyboard-navigable. In version 22.08 it works even better than ever before, as you can reach and trigger all controls for each item in it.

Furthermore, if you are using a touchscreen, tapping a song in Elisa’s playlist will play it immediately rather than simply selecting it. We have also made the the items on the playlist taller and more finger-friendly, making it easier to use.

As for your music collection, you can now choose to disable the automatic scan on startup, and only run it manually, and sort tracks view by "Date Modified" — useful if you want to play things you've recently added or changed. Finally, Elisa's "Files" view starts at root in version 22.08, so you can easily access music that isn't in your home folder.

General

Apart for new versions of apps, KDE Gear delivers updates to the underlying frameworks that power the apps. That means that upgrades in a framework will pop up also in apps that depend on it.

Like Dolphin, Gwenview, and Spectacle now use the XDG Portals interface for dragged-and-dropped files. This allows them to successfully drop files into sandboxed apps without punching a hole in the sandbox by giving it access to your entire home folder or the system’s temp folder.

And in the Plasma Wayland session, a wide variety of single-window KDE apps now have their existing windows brought to the front when re-launched from Kickoff, KRunner, etc.

And all This Too...

• Ark now checks to make sure that there will be sufficient free space in the place when you’re trying to un-archive something before it starts
• Clicking on a Konsole notification about a particular session now takes you to that session in Konsole
• Skanpage now supports exporting searchable PDFs using optical character recognition!
• Gwenview, KDE's popular image-viewer, adds annotations to its image-editing functions. The annotation feature is the same as the one used in Spectacle, so you will probably already be familiar with it.

Full changelog here.

KDE is All About the Apps

One of the Goals of KDE is to be All About the Apps. This means the KDE Community takes more charge of releasing our own software and delivering it directly to you. Although we fully support distributions that ship our software, KDE Gear 22.04 apps will also be available on these Linux app stores shortly:

If you'd like to help us get more KDE applications into the app stores, support more app stores and get the apps better integrated into our development process, come say hi in our All About the Apps chat room.