In September 2024, the annual KDE conference Akademy was held in Würzburg. I've been to all Akademies from 2004-2020 (except 2005). Then came Covid, private life, etc. So it was kind of special that I finally made it to Würzburg again, which was just a ~2h ride away by train. And it was a good decision: Since many KDE contributors (also those who stayed with KDE a for a log time) came to this Akademy. It was a good opportunity to meet old friends again.

And that remided me of a blog post I wrote 15 years ago: The Power of Developer Meetings. In that post I was highlighting the importance of face-to-face meetings. What I wrote back then is still relevant today, so I'll just repeat:

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor and simplifies communication a lot.
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about what to do and how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I still haven’t seen such focused work in companies yet, even 15 years later).
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
• Steady Contributions: New contributors always pop up, which is in particular very nice. Everyone is welcome to set a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants joining developer meetings / conferences usually contribute for years to come.

I enjoyed meeting KWin developers (new and old ones), plasma developers, and Kate developers again (of course!). All in all I am very happy to see the lively community that KDE managed to be for over 25 years - well done!

Having said that, I am looking forward to Akademy 2025, that will be hosted in Berlin again. In case you are unsure to go there, I suggest to just do it! It's certainly going to be a very good experience, so go ahead and register now.

PS: Würzburg has one touristic spot, the "Alte Mainbrücke". Pretty much every tourist goes to this bridge and drinks a wine - I did so, too :-)

Techpaladin becomes an official KDE patron and contributes to our community's funding.

Techpaladin is a consultancy firm specialized in advancing the state of the art in KDE software.

Techpaladin was founded by experienced and prominent KDE contributors who develop KDE-based software for such high-profile companies such as Valve and Qt Group.

"KDE is the giant whose shoulders Techpaladin sits upon," says Nate Graham, CEO of Techpaladin, "so we're very happy to support the mission and the foundation that pushes it forward. KDE e.V. helps make what we do possible, so becoming a Patron is the logical next step!"

"We are glad to welcome Techpaladin as our Patron", says Aleix Pol, President of KDE e.V. "Although a young organisation, we are very familiar with much of the team and know they share a lot of the same values as KDE. I look forward to growing KDE and its products together with them — what better way to do so than as a Patron?"

Techpaladin joins KDE e.V.'s other patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical, g10 Code, Google, Kubuntu Focus, Mbition, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company and TUXEDO Computers, who support free open source software and KDE development through KDE e.V.

Today, we bring you a report on the brand-new release of the Maui Project.

Downloads & Sources

You can get the stable release packages [APKs, AppImage, TARs] directly from the KDE downloads server at https://download.kde.org/stable/maui/

All of the Maui repositories have the newly released branches and tags. You can get the sources right from the Maui group: https://invent.kde.org/maui

MauiKit 4 Frameworks & Apps

With the previous version released, MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps were ported to Qt6; however, some regressions were introduced, and those bugs have now been fixed with this new revision.

Some of the changes and improvements were taking longer, so we skipped the February release and moved it to May, so here it is. With an ever-improving MauiKir set of frameworks powering the set os Maui Apps.

MauiKit Frameworks

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

With the new control Notification, it is much simpler and easier to dispatch notifications with MauiKit. To find more about MauiKit controls check out the documentation and examples.@maui_project https://t.co/ItSDxIDUkL#mauikit pic.twitter.com/zSdJeffXbp

— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) January 20, 2025

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• MauiKit notifications now allow you to set custom actions, not only using the notify method, but also for convenience by using the Maui.Notification type. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classNotification.html]
• The MauiKit controls templates for list and grid elements have been reviewed, and any binding loops have been squashed. Also, those elements such as GridBrowserDelegate, ListBrowserDelegate, ListItemTemplate, GridItemTemplate set their implicit sizes correctly.
• It is now possible for third parties to create custom styles that adapt to MauiKit. Creating a custom QQC2 style is quite simple; to preserve Maui visuals, the new style should use MauiKit properties for setting colors, and elements, margins, padding, and sizing, etc. To allow this, please refer to MauiMan property allowCustomStyling. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classStyle.html]
• Add more resize-edges to the ApplicationWindow in CSD mode
• MauiKit ImageViewer type has gained more properties for finer control
• MauiKit now disables effects when the software renderer is used.
• Added helper methods to classify types of text string, such as email, link, phone number, etc, see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classHandy.html]
• More controls now support the attached properties from Controls, such as badges and status. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classControls.html]
• The keyboard navigation has been reviewed and refined.
• More consistent spacing and padding on the templated elements when some parts are not visible.
• Added method to check number of active windows per app. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classMauiApp.html]
• In nested and composed controls, use the background of the top root element.
• Fixes creating dialogs from component types.
• TabView and Page controls now support grouped properties for the tabBar and header and footer columns, respectively, to tweak the margins. see [headerContainer.margins: 10]
• The PageLayout control can now split the header elements into the footer, but also pick which section of the header will be moved when split, by using the property splitSection. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classPageLayout.html]
• Tweak and better translucency effects for the Page and TabBar headers and footers. (To disable effects, refer to the MauiMan Theme property: enableEffects)
• The Nitrux CSD theme has been improved to be more compact visually
• Fixes to SelectionBar drag and drop feature.
• SideBarView can now be resized live
• SideBarView now has a float property, which will not push the contents but float over it. see [https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classSideBar.html]
• The ToastArea for notifications is now keyboard navigable.
• MauiKit-Filebrowsing fixes Tagging regressions and multithreading crashing issues.
• MauiKit-Terminal fixes and supports for translucency, signaling current working directory changes, exposing background and foreground colors properties, and updating the touch area.
• MauiKit-Documents fixes the search results highlights and supports initial text selection.
• MauiKit-ImageTools now makes use of the KEviv2 library wrapper for managing image metadata editing. Includes a new image editor based on OpenCV, and improves upon the existing interface for text detection in images OCR.
• MauiKit-ImageTools improves the keyboard navigation on its custom controls.
• MauiKit-FileBrowsing, the Tagging interface, now emits the right signals upon new tag creations. Improve the OpenWith dialog with an informative header. Improve keyboard navigation and multiple file selection in FileBrowser component using keyboards.
• Moreover, see [https://invent.kde.org/maui]

Maui Apps

Currently, the set of Maui Apps amounts to over 10+ apps. For this release, the focus has been to improve the experience in the main set of apps, such as Index, Pix, Statio, while keeping up to date with the other ones.

The apps now have better keyboard navigation support, include new features, and a cohesive layout/design where the app’s main content is put on the front by using a modern “floaty” style.

Pix now includes, in the viewer, OCR auto recognition, along with a ui/ux for quickly selecting the text found in images. A new image editor backed by OpenCV , improved navigation patterns, fixed GPS browsing, and a metadata reader and editor now using KDE’s library kexiv2.  You can also quickly navigate multiple images from the editor, and in desktop environments, Pix supports opening an image per window.

Here you can watch Pix OCR in action:

The Pix image editor is coming from MauiKit-ImageTools, and for this initial release, it has the basic image manipulation controls, such as brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc. And some experimental filters. Upcoming versions should start adding up much more controls for more detailing editing. Algo object recognition is planned for upcoming releases by using OpenCV.

Station, the terminal emulator, now better supports command shortcuts in a new sidebar, which is useful for touch-based input. The sidebar is integrated using the new floaty style.

For those who fancy a good-looking terminal, Station brings back support for the translucency effect under Plasma. The screenshots below show Station on a PinePhone and a desktop under Plasma using the effect.

From previous releases, Station, can now launch and open URLs from the output by right-clicking on the selected text string. The touch area for mobile screens has been fixed, and the gesture shortcuts work great, and a bottom toolbar with common “keys” is available and responsive to the current program running, for example is running “nano” the keys will be relevant to that.

Index, out file manager, now has an action bar floating over the browser for quickly performing actions.

Index comes with improvements in the contextual menus when applying actions to multiple files and keyboard navigation.

• A more focused UI design.
• Index, Pix, and Vvave remember the last tag used and suggest it.
• Notifies when a file has been tagged and allows opening the given tag from the notification
• Fixes to the creation and destruction of dialogs.
• The embedded terminal can now be manually synced by using the context menu or the ‘Ctrl+.’ keyboard shortcut

Buho now supports opening notes in different windows in desktop mode. And exposes a server method for third-party apps to save notes to it quickly, for example, Pix is now using this interface to save the text found in an image to a note in Buho.

Shelf, using MauiKit-Documents, now has text selection support and improved found text highlights.

You can follow the project on Mastodon or X to keep up to date on the changes being made. And if you are planning to work on an app for Linux and considering MauiKit for the UI, please do not hesitate to reach up to us for help, advice, or suggestions. Some updates coming from X follow:

Pix image viewer with auto text detection@maui_project pic.twitter.com/OPpdmDaxUj

— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) March 5, 2025

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Pix is coming with a new image editor for the upcoming release. #mauikit@maui_project pic.twitter.com/Vh7LDvr6QJ

— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) April 9, 2025

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Buho – notes app- now supports opening notes on multiple windows for desktop mode. And coming next is support for Markdown text format! #mauikit@maui_project pic.twitter.com/29Ymxr3MFI

— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) April 19, 2025

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That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 4.0.3 stable release. 🙂

Release schedule

The post Maui Release Briefing #8 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.

Nowadays it is getting more and more popular to write Qt applications in Python using a binding module like PySide6. One reason for this is probably Python's rich data science ecosystem which makes it a breeze to load and visualize complex datasets. In this article we focus (although not exclusively) on the widespread plotting library Matplotlib: We demonstrate how you can embed it in PySide applications and how you can customize the default look and feel to your needs. We round off the article with an outlook into Python plotting libaries beyond Matplotlib and their significance for Qt.

Continue reading Interactive Plots with PySide6 at basysKom GmbH.

Being the workhorse for more than a decade, it took me by surprise that Qt 5 is going to run out of support tomorrow. Honestly, Qt 6 was released in late 2020 and I prefer using modern code bases that use features from the C++17 and C++20 standards. So, no reason to hold me back.

I am pleased to announce the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.9.0. It consist of the Qt 6 port and has no additional features or bug fixes. Quite boring, it does not even look nicer or different at all. Many thanks to Florian Satzger and Mark Penner for helping with the port when I got stuck.

Behind the curtain, we use KDE CI templates for the build pipeline, increased the minimum required version numbers for Qt, CMake and C++, and some minor warnings got fixed. We are back using semantic versioning. New features are added with an increased minor version number. Increased patch numbers are for bug fixes only.

Adding sound does not work properly, this is a known bug.

You can create the tar ball using the 0.9.0 Git tag.

Get involved!

I was super happy to receive help with the Qt 6 port. It is so cool to work with strangers and achieve so much. Being united by the desire to create powerful software, is a strong motivation.

I am desperately looking for more people to get involved in KDE Stopmotion. If you are looking for a place to make a contribution, consider it! Some areas for contributors come to my mind:

• Use more modern libraries to grab the images from cameras. We have several options and some of these are unmaintained for years. Adding more recent options would be great.
• Starting with integration into KDE's software stack. Stopmotion is still in the incubation phase. The software uses Qt but not KDE frameworks or other things from the ecosystem like handling the translations or a neat integration of the documentation.
• Improving our test automation would be great.
• The code base is 20 years old. Some C++ patterns used in the code might no longer be the best choice and a replacement with C++20 code might improve the quality.
  

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week we look at the usability improvements landing in NeoChat, and KClock; important bug fixes in Akonadi; performance improvements in KTorrent and new features in Kate and KRDC.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Multimedia Applications

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Christoph Wolk fixed an issue where lyrics were displayed on top of the metadata of a song (link).

Okular View and annotate documents

Albert Astals Cid fixed opening password protected files on builds without KWallet (link).

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker Krause added support for MOTIS instances without OSM street routing capabilities (link). This is the case for the backup instance of Transitous.

Volker also upstreamed various parts of Itineray and KTrip to KPublicTransport to be able to reuse them in both applications. This include the vehicle layout view (link 1, link 2 and link 3) and the DelayRow (link).

In terms of ticket support, Joshua Goins improved the reliability when parsing american airlines tickets (link). Volker improved the Flixbus PDF extractor (link). Additionally, Volker also added onboard API support for Ouigo ES (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Wolthera van Hövell added support for parsing and writing SVG title and description elements (link).

Kdenlive Video editor

balooii added a rotation capability to monitor and effect stack tooling (link). They also fixed some artifact issues in the vectorscope tool on high zoom levels (link).

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle added an option to show thumbnails in the markers list dialog (link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Facundo Almeida fixed an authentification issue when connecting to a server with SFTP and a public key and a keyboard-interactive authentication method (link).

Whale

Carl Schwan continued working on Whale, a QML based file manager, and redesigning the header to look more closely to the current Dolphin design (link).

Journald Browser Browser for journald databases

Andreas Cord-Landwehr reworked the search integration and added a button to toggle between case-sensitive/insensitive search (link).

Educational Applications

LabPlot Visualize and analyze data

Martin Marmsoler added the possibility to create nested plots (link).

Martin also improved the axis ticks with a new algorithm to determine the spacing and number of major axis ticks (link).

Finally Martin also fixed a few issues. The cursor dock can now be correctly added when the properties dock is hidden (link). Formulas are correctly updated after importing them (link).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins overhauled how NeoChat restores rooms on space switch (link). Now when you switch spaces, the last room in that space is stored and will be restored.

Joshua improved many dialogs (link).

Joshua also went bug hunting on the message delegates in the timeline and fixed many issues (link). Notably the location map and context menu for non-text messages work again and some wording was improved. Speaking of context menus, Joshua also added a new context menu when right clicking on an avatar (link), added a share action to the maximized delegate (link), and made it possible to access all emojis from the context menu (link).

Joshua also improved the UX for rooms that don't have a canonical alias (link), fixed running NeoChat on Android (link), and reorganized some elements in the room settings (link).

Tobias created a mock server implementation of a Matrix server to use for testing (link).

James Graham made the user id elide in the user detail dialog when it is too long to avoid overflow (link).

Browsers and Networking

KTorrent BitTorrent Client

Andrey Semashev optimized various hot spots in KTorrent. He reduced the number of allocations for each packet from 3 to 1 (link), optimized the storage of some lists (link), reduced the algorithmic complexity of the file cache from O(log n) to roughly O(1) (link) and fixed some Qt container detaching issues (link).

Andrey Semashev also added support for OpenSSL as the cryptography backend (link).

Philipp Kiemle fixed some UI strings to be HIG complient (link 1 and link 2)

George Florea Bănuș added support for showing the total amount of bytes uploaded or downloaded for a file in the current session (link).

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

Fabio Bas and Luke Dashjr added a button to toggle clipboard sharing in KRDC (link).

Christopher Chan added support for admin console session (link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

lzwind fixed a memory leak issue when a device is disconnected (link).

KDE PIM

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Allen Winter updated the list of DAV providers, removing some defunct providers and adding new ones like Fastmail, SOGo, Citadel, Zoho, and Kopano (link 1, link 2, link 3, ...).

Allen also fixed a crash when trying to update an item (link).

Carl Schwan fixed three crashes related to fetching passwords from the system keyring found via Sentry (link 1, link 2 and link 3), and another crash when trying to load an account with an unknown authentication type (link).

Akonadi Console

Carl Schwan fixed a crash when editing or deleting a tag (link).

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Allen Winter removed the Get Hot New Calendar feature from Korganizer (link). It was only featuring school holidays and football season calendars from the 2006-2008 era.

Allen hid the todo list from the KOrganized sidebar when already using the todo view (link) and added an option to show/hide the week numbers in the date navigator (link).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Tobias Fella improved the success message when uploading a key (link), added a warning when disabling a certificate (link), and added a plural variant to a UI string when verifying multiple signatures from the same file (link).

Games

Chessament - Chess tournament manager

Manuel Alcaraz started incubating Chessament, a chess tournament manager.

Utilities

Clock Keep time and set alarms

Kai Uwe Broulik put the stopwatch and timer time in the navigation bar when on a different page (link).

Kai also added some explanation about the keyboard shortcuts (link).

Han Young added the ability to change the default timer sound (link).

Kate Advanced text editor

Leo Ruggeri added an "Edit line" entry to the diff widget context menu (link). The action opens the file referenced by the diff at the selected line.

Konsole Use the command line interface

Luca Carlon optimized some code where we did some uncesserary copy (link 1 and link 2).

ISO Image Writer Write an ISO Image to a USB Disk

Philipp Kiemle fixed a word puzzle issue (link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. 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. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Introduction¶

I started writing this blog post in March, completely oblivious of Mozilla’s plans of getting rid of Pocket, but with life and work being in the way I never got around to finishing it. Now that we know that Pocket is being shut down on 8 July, I decided to speed things up – and what better day to blog about eReaders than Towel Day!

For a long time already I have been aware of Wallabag – in fact, since it was still called (In the) Poche¹. And have used it before, through its wonderful service https://wallabag.it.

But for equally long, I have also used Pocket (which used to be called Read-it-later). I found that some things worked better in Pocket and others in Wallabag. But the thing that ever so slightly tipped the scales in Pocket’s favour several times before for me was that it had a seemless integration with my Kobo² eInk reader.

I have also been keeping an occasional eye on alternative eReader software for many years, but never took the plunge for different reasons. One of the things that I was waiting to become brave enough to try out was also InkBox / Quill OS for Kobo devices. I was aware of KOReader and Plato, but was always betting a bit more on InkBox as a more “pure” full-blown FOSS OS as something I would eventually switch to.

Of course, I am using the venerable Calibre to manage my eBook collection. Lately instead of a local collection though, I have all my eBooks on my home server³ using the Calibre-Web for the whole family.

OK, with that brief introductory info dump over, here is how my first week (and at this stage, honestly, months) with KOReader + Wallabag went.

Day 1 – Braving up to flash my Kobo¶

At first, I was a bit scared and did not want to mess with setting up KOReader, as I heard it was very configurable and also I have had … mixed … experience with flashing devices so far.

So I decided this would be a weekend project and planned accordingly.

Long story short, after some searching and reading, I found on MobileRead forums the instructions for One-Click Install Packages for KOReader & Plato, so that is what I went with.

Honestly, it was pretty much as simple as it sounds! And it just installs alongside the official Kobo system too.

If you were even a bit curious, do not wait as long as I have – just go and try it. It really is dead simple!

I decided to use the archive that includes both KOReader and Plato, because I heard the former is very tweakable, but you need to put some effort into making it your own; and the latter has very pleasing defaults, but barely any options.

Day 2 – Install and first glance at KOReader and Plato¶

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the One-Click Install Packages was stupid-simple to do.

Essentially I ended up with an additional menu in the official Kobo firmware, where I can choose to launch either Plato or KOReader.

I later also had the opportunity to check that updating KOReader works from the device itself and is as simple as selecting “Update” from the main menu.

First, I tried Plato, and while I quite liked its æsthetics, the longer I used it, the more I wanted to tweak a few things here and there. I would say that if Plato does exactly what you want, it is a great option, though. Especially if you have a larger screen.

My very first exposure with KOReader turned out as expected – too many menus, too many options, too much stuff – I felt a bit overwhelmed. But after the inital shock, it took me just a few hours to get a good feel of everything. The KOReader user guide helped a lot here too.

At this point, I was hooked!

The previously overwhelming plethora of settings suddenly became a collection of options that I was looking forward to tame and make my eReader truly sing to my tune. A lot of hacks exist out there for Kobo’s official firmware – and I used a few already –, but what KOReader offered out of the box was on a different level.

What also helps a lot is that you can easily disable plugins and menu entries that you do not use or want.

By the end of the day, I essentially set up my KOReader to be like I wanted it to. Sure, it took some hours, but it was well worth it.

Day 3 – Renewed interest in Wallabag¶

Both Plato and KOReader include a Wallabag client, so that got rid of one of my main reason to continue using Pocket.

With that out of the way, I went ahead and installed Wallabag on my home server⁴.

Which, thanks to YunoHost, was, again, just a one-click install :)

The set-up on KOReader was a bit more involved than just entering the username and password, but nothing too taxing.

Once it was set up though, it was about as easy to use as the official Pocket app on the offical Kobo firmware. I was honestly positiely suprised!

The main difference is that KOReader stores Wallabag articles as ePUB in a separate folder and syncs (in both directions) those with the Wallabag server. Treating articles as any other book on the device has some benefits, like annotation support (more on that later) and being able to modify styles etc.

I did try WallabaKo – the hack that puts the Wallabag client into Kobo’s official firmware – before and it works in a similar way. But its method to sync the articles is (undestandably) a bit hacky and not as nice as KOReader’s and the integration is not quite as frictionless. That said, if you do want to simply continue to just use the official Kobo firmware, WallabaKo is a perfectly fine solution. I do recommend you use the NickelMenu launcher to trigger the sync in that case.

Day 4 – Advanced Wallabag use, some automation¶

Today felt like the right time to poke around my new Wallabag install a bit.

As I used Wallabag before, I was quite comfortable with its basics and decided to read about some more advanced features and try to make things easier for me.

One thing I quickly made use of was to “program” a few rules to automatically tag an article. This makes finding a specific article – especially month after I have added or even read it – easier.

For example⁵:

• if « domainName matches "kde.org" OR content matches "KDE" » then tag as « KDE »
• if « domainName matches "curia.europa.eu" OR content matches "CJEU" OR content matches "Court of Justice of the European Union" » then tag as « sodna praksa, eu »

Occasionally the automatic tags are not perfect. But those can be easily changed already when you add the new article either through the browser plugin or the mobile app. Of course, you can also do it through the main WebApp too.

Then I remembered having seen some RSS support existed. And since there are some feeds that I know I would always read through my eReader anyway, that was an awesome idea! Unfortunately it was not exactly what I remembered …

Wallabag does offer RSS feeds you can subscribe to, but is not what I was looking for.

This feature was requested before, but the core team decided against adding it. It seems that they did add this feature into their SaaS offering though, so that is a bit bitter. If you really want to easily get RSS/Atom feeds directly onto your eReader, you can either have an account on wallabag.it or use KOReader’s News plugin.

Personally, I prefer having all my long articles in Wallabag, so I decided to just continue manually saving them.

Day 5 – Exploration, integration, interconnection¶

At this point, I had pretty much everything going well and was looking for improving my reading workflows.

Articles¶

When I find a new article/page online that I want to read later on my eReader there are two options:

1. It is an article I found through the web browser.
   1. I save it using the browser plugin or the mobile app to Wallabag.
   2. In KOReader I sync with Wallabag and read the article on my eReader
2. It is an article in a RSS/Atom feed I am already subscribed to through Nextcloud News.
   1. As I typically browse my feeds on my mobile phone, when I scroll through an article in the Nextcloud News mobile app that if find too long to read right now, I share it with the Wallabag mobile app.
   2. In KOReader I sync with Wallabag and read the article on my eReader

eBook libraries and collections¶

When it comes to eBooks themselves, I have a shared Calibre Web library with my family and can browse that directly from my KOReader.

How does this magic work?

Fairly simple really. On my home server I mount my Calibre folder in Nextcloud as external storage (with appropriate file system permissions) and then in turn use KOReader’s WebDAV plugin to browse directly from my device.

There is also OPDS support but it currently does not work for my server. You can use it to browse public servers perfectly fine though!

Notes and marginalia¶

Since I started using a Zettelkasten(-like) method of taking notes in MarkDown, I was very happy to see that KOReader can export highlights and notes to MarkDown. Even better! It can push them to Nextcloud Notes, which I use to sync my notes between my phone and laptop anyway!

And this is where the “Wallabag articles are just ePUBs” coolness kicks in – because this means you can also treat highlights and notes the same as in any other eBook, export to Markdown and all.

That made me super happy!

Day 8 – Surprise of the day night¶

Something I spotted early on, was Night mode.

When I tried it it seemed to just invert the text and background colours to be white on black instead. Which I thought was pretty wasted on an eInk display, since it does not emit light anyway.

But no! It does make sense.

When I was reading late at night, as I usually do, I turned on the front-light and set it to the minimum, just to see a bit better.

And that is when it hit me – if you use Night mode when your front-light is on, you get even less light, because the black ink blocks it. That was such a delight to find out.

Day 9 – MOAR AUTOMATION … or not (yet)¶

I guess at this point it is safe to say I fully made the switch …

After being completely flabbergasted at the usefulness of Night mode, I noticed you can automate when it should turn on and off! So I did! So many options too!

Then I found and read up on Profiles and immediately my mind went buzzing with ideas:

• when I close a book, automatically export the notes (and upload them to my Nextcloud Notes)
• when I open an ePUB from (the) Wallabag (folder), apply the HTML5 CSS style
• when I open an ePUB that I generated from a webpage that contains legislation, apply certain style tweaks in order to make the structured articles and paragraphs actually palatable to the eyes

Unfortunately, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself.

The first one works, but I could not figure out how to get it to actually trigger automatically on book close. I have that option enabled, but it just does not fire. The trigger actually triggers and the export works in general too. Just the combination does not work. (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)

As for the other two, it seems KOReader does not allow for style and style tweaks to be set in a Profile yet. (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)

Next few weeks – end of honeymoon¶

In the days and weeks after the honeymoon phase I did start noticing some small issues:

• It is annoying that KOReader(’s Wallabag client’s) highlights and notes and the Wallabag highlights and notes are two completely separate things that have no idea about each other. My current solution is to try and annotatate books and articles only through KOReader, and ignore the fact that Wallabag has this functionality.
• In Wallabag you cannot search/filter for several tags at the same time (e.g. ”AI” and ”data mining” and ”copyright”). – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• In KOReader Wallabag does not parse HTML <abbr> tags. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• Wallabag articles do not show their length in KOReader unless you open them, which is not major, but a bit annoying when you are trying to find something to read suitable to your time available. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• When highlighting sentences in KOReader the end punctuation is not being included consistently. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• Wallabag does not translate footnote anchors into internal anchors (i.e. strip the URL when it is the same as the article’s), so clicking on a footnote tries to load a new page instead of just scrolling down. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• I have not figured out yet how to sync book descriptions and star ratings from KOReader to Calibre-Web (or Wallabag).
• At some point exporting margialia to Nextcoud Notes started crashing – this is a known bug and should be fixed soon
• I have suggested some issues and improvements when it comes to the Markdown export of marginalia. There is some pushback, but also some workarounds offered. I need to look into it a bit more.
• It would be great if Wallabag tags could be used on KOReader too.

But ultimately, if I am completely honest, these are all issues I could only dream of having before I went on this adventure.

I hope they get fixed at some point, as that would make my little old eReader ever so closer to being the wonderful box the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was imagined to be.

But even if not, this switch was well worth it!

Interesting related tidbits¶

When using a third-party WebDAV client (including your operating system’s built-in client), you should use an application password for login rather than your regular password. In addition improved security, this increases performance significantly. See Nextcloud documentation on Third-party WebDAV clients.

hook out → whelp, now to find a replacement batteries for Kobo Aura and Kobo Aura One

Here we are in the year 2025 and every company that wants to grab your money now peddles AI.

Even most search engines will now start with some “AI powered” summary.

Unfortunately, what they give you is just some deep learning intelligence fake.

Just imagine, you don’t read the links yourself, but you pass that to some friend/colleague/… that might be a nice person but is known to, if in doubt, not to tell that he did not understand what he should do, but just returns some random stuff that sounds like it could be true.

That is the state of AI.

Naturally one has trained the models to death on standard questions and problems, ask a semi new model why the sky is blue and you get the same answer as on the Wikipedia, more or less.

But try it different: Ask something that for sure is no training question.

My self serving question, just to see if the standard models know something about Kate (and perhaps me). Naturally not just ‘me’ invented Kate, but let’s roll with that.

Who invented the Kate editor?

Let’s ask the gemma3 model:

The Kate editor was primarily developed by Michael Hofmann.

Here’s a breakdown of the key figures and the evolution of Kate:

Michael Hofmann (Lead Developer): Hofmann started working on Kate as a personal tool for editing and exploring Markdown. He initially created it as a command-line tool and gradually built out the features we see today. He’s the driving force behind the project and continues to actively maintain and develop it. Other Contributors: While Hofmann is the central figure, Kate has benefited from significant contributions from a community of developers and designers. Important contributors include: Matt Butcher: Made significant contributions to the UI design and the editor’s overall look and feel. Daniel Wani: Was instrumental in the early development and testing. Key Timeline:

2013-2015: Initial development started by Michael Hofmann as a personal tool. 2015: Kate was released as open-source. 2016: The first desktop version was released. In short, Michael Hofmann is widely considered the inventor of the Kate editor, but it’s a product of a collaborative effort.

You can find more information about the development history on the Kate editor’s website: katex.app

Ok? No idea where that stems from.

Next try, ask llama3.2:

I couldn’t find any information on who specifically “invented” the Kate editor, but it was primarily developed by Michael Hofmann.

The Kate editor is a command-line text editor that was first released in 2005 and has since become popular among programmers and developers. It’s known for its speed, efficiency, and customization options.

If you’re looking for more information on the history of Kate or its development, I’d be happy to try and help!

A bit better, at least some hint that the answer could be useless. Half contradicting the first, given there the same person seem to have invented that close to one decade later.

Next try, ask deepseek-r1:

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005. Since then, it has been actively maintained and improved by a community of contributors who have added features, enhanced its functionality, and worked on its documentation.

Kate is known for its simplicity, speed, and ability to perform complex text transformations quickly. It is widely used in development environments and is often bundled with modern IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like JetBrains Rider for Java and .NET projects.

If you’re looking for more details about Kate or its history, feel free to ask!

Matching a bit the second answer with more interesting random pseudo facts.

Ok, then let’s try the Brave browser AI search:

Kate Editor Inventor The KDE community developed the KDE Advanced Text Editor, or Kate. It has been a part of the KDE Software Compilation since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001.

That looks at least reasonable.

Let’s put the first sentence of one of the answers in the Brave browser AI search to see what happens then:

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005.

You get back:

The Kate editor is part of the KDE free software community and was not invented by a single individual. Development of Kate began in 2001 with the release of KDE Software Compilation version 2.2. Michael Hofmann is known for his contributions to the project, but he did not single-handedly create it. Kate is an advanced text editor that supports syntax highlighting, code folding, and multiple cursors, among other features.

Now you have Michael Hofmann back, as that was in your search prompt. None of the linked search results tell you a sentences about Michael Hofmann, this was just nicely hallucinated into the summary because it was in the prompt.

I don’t say that AI tooling is useless, deep learning is a very useful tool.

But I am afraid many people will just read the AI summary box above the search results and believe that is a real summary.

No, it is not.

If you rephrase the

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005.

to something different, with a different name and perhaps not that nice achievement, you will likely just get a hallucinated confirmation of your query.

And voila: you asked if some thing you heard somewhere is true and more or less get it confirmed because you asked about it.

We then end up here:

I said it because it is the truth. It is the truth because I said it.

I hope that enough people understand that issue and don’t fall for the trap of only peaking at the AI summary and not actually looking at the search results. But as it is that convenient, and even I often just read that first, I am afraid that will not be the case.

Naturally the search results themselves were never the fully reliable source of information.

They are weighted and sorted via algorithms that will keep in mind a lot of things that might not be in your interest and even without that, perhaps just the found pages are full of half truths or lies (like this one :)

But the AI summary box just adds one level more that can introduce just any kind of error or bias on top of that.