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.

We're actually going to be using the Do Not Disturb feature in Plasma 6.4.

I say that because previously we had a hack that simply allowed notifications to display over top of fullscreen windows, and do not disturb was only ever used if:

• Screens are mirrored
• During screen sharing
• The user invoked it manually

This was a little odd, and led to some inconsistencies. Plus only Plasma knew about the user's preference to see notifications in fullscreen, and despite notifications being inhibited reading org.freedesktop.Notifications.Inhibited would return false.

I changed this to actually use do not disturb when a fullscreen window is focused. This is more predictable and in-line with what the user would expect, enhancing the UX and communication with other parts of the system and apps.

As a result, we've discovered several bugs that had gone unnoticed! So far:

• Notifications not being marked read
• Showing a summary for unwanted notifications
• Showing a summary every time the user leaves DND
• Not showing critical notifications in DND when we should
• Disabling app-specific notification history also prevents it from participating in DND summaries

My impression is that these bugs were not evident before because few people were actually using the do not disturb feature, thanks to the way we previously handled notifications with fullscreen applications. Everyone has been hard at work getting these fixed and hopefully DND will be more useful, predictable, and reliable! 🎉 😄

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.8.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing two new form delegates along with various quality-of-life enhancements.

New Features

I added two new form delegates: FormLinkDelegate (!343) and FormIconDelegate (!355).

The first one is similar to FormButtonDelegate, but it’s used to display an external link. It’s already used on the About page:

The second one was upstreamed from Marknote and allows the user to pick an icon and display the selected icon.

I also added a password quality checker to FormPasswordFieldDelegate (!345). This is particularly useful when asking users to create an account:

Visual Changes

Kai Uwe Broulik improved avatar rendering. Initials are now always displayed consistently even on small screen (!363).

Kai also fixed an issue on mobile where library information on the About page was being ellipsized (!356).

Balló György fixed several issues when using Kirigami with the QtQuick software rendering backend (!350, !351).

I made the delegates provided by Kirigami Addons now have a slightly larger touch area on mobile (!349). Unfortunately, I also had to remove the small hover animations, as they occasionally caused visual glitches (1d6e84cd).

Convenient New APIs

Joshua Goins added an opened property to ConvergentContextMenu (!352), and I added a close method to allow closing the menu programmatically (!364).

I also added support for trailing items in FormTextFieldDelegate (f996fc6e).

Documentation

Thiago Sueto ported the entire library to QDoc (!354). QDoc provides much better support for QML.

Other Changes

“trapped-in-dreams” significantly improved the performance of the date picker (!360).

Volker Krause updated the project templates to reflect current best practices for Android support (!359).

Packager Section

1.8.0 had an issue with system not having QDoc, but a bug fix release is available as 1.8.1 with the fix for that.

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

We have moved the deadline for talk submission for Akademy 2025 to the end of the month. Submit your talks now! 

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2025q2/008217.html 

https://akademy.kde.org/2025/cfp/

I recently made a patch to Konsole terminal emulator, that adds to the current tab layout saving system couple more things:

• Working directory
• Size of splits
• Optional command to run

You can find the patch here: ViewManager: Save columns, lines and working directory to tabLayout (!1095)

It's a feature I've seen in other terminal editors, so I wanted to add it to Konsole as well.

Note that this is not in current version of Konsole, but it will be in the next one: 25.07. Unless it gets backported, of course.

Current tab layouts

In Konsole, you can even in current version save your tab layout:

1. Open Konsole
2. Split the current view into multiple ones
3. Go to Menu -> View -> Save tab layout...

This produces a JSON file like this:

{
    "Orientation": "Vertical",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        },
        {
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        }
    ]
}

Now, as it is currently, it's not that useful. The split sizes won't be saved, for example.

My changes

My changes now allow you to save the size of the splits and the working directories, like this:

{
    "Orientation": "Horizontal",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "Columns": 88,
            "Command": "",
            "Lines": 33,
            "SessionRestoreId": 0,
            "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli/Repositories"
        },
        {
            "Orientation": "Vertical",
            "Widgets": [
                {
                    "Columns": 33,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 21,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0,
                    "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli/Documents"
                },
                {
                    "Columns": 33,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 10,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0,
                    "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

As you can see, it saves the Columns, Lines, WorkingDirectory. It also adds empty Command item, which you can write any command in, like ls -la, or keep it empty.

You can try to use the columns and lines sections to modify the size manually, but I've noticed it's easier just to do it inside Konsole.

Now the old layout file will work too, if the field doesn't exist Konsole won't do anything about it.

Note about the command: Konsole basically pretends to type that command in when it loads, so the commands don't need a separate Parameter field or anything like that. You could make the command something like foo && bar -t example && baz --parameter. Konsole then just types that in and presses enter for you. :)

More concrete example

I made this change because I wanted to run Konsole in following layout:

{
    "Orientation": "Horizontal",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "Orientation": "Vertical",
            "Widgets": [
                {
                    "Columns": 139,
                    "Command": "hx .",
                    "Lines": 50,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0
                },
                {
                    "Columns": 139,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 14,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "Columns": 60,
            "Command": "lazygit",
            "Lines": 66,
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        }
    ]
}

With these items I can get the layout splits as I want, with any commands I want.

Then I have a bash script to run this layout in the directory the script is run at:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
konsole --separate --hold --workdir "$1" --layout "$HOME/Documents/helix-editor.json" &

Now when I go to any project folder and run this script, it will open the Helix text editor, lazygit and empty split the way I want it, without having to make these splits manually every time.

Sure I could use something like Zellij for this but they have so much things I don't need, I just wanted to split the view and save/load that arrangement.

In future

I would like to add a small GUI tool inside Konsole that allows you to customize these layout easily during save process, such as changing the WorkingDirectory and Command parameters.

But for now, you'll have to do it inside the JSON file, but chances are when you want to do layouts like this, you're comfortable editing these kind of files anyway.

I hope some others will find this useful as well, for things like system monitoring etc.

Hope you like it!

(This blog is originally posted to KDE Blogs.)

Hi everyone!

I’m Derek Lin, also known as kenoi. I’m a second-year student at the University of Waterloo and really excited to be working on developing Karton, a virtual machine manager, this summer. This project will be a part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 program and mentored by Harald Sitter, Tobias Fella, and Nicolas Fella. Over the past few months, I’ve been contributing to the project through some merge requests and I hope to get it to a somewhat polished state towards the end of the program!

About Karton Virtual Machine Manager

Currently, GTK-based virtual machine managers (virt-manager, GNOME Boxes) are the norm for a lot of KDE users, but they are generally not well integrated into the Plasma environment. Although there has been work done in the past with making a Qt-Widget-based virtual machine manager, it has not been maintained for many years and the UI is quite dated.

Karton, as originally started by Aaron Rainbolt was planned to be a QEMU frontend for virtualization through its CLI. Eventually, the project ownership was handed over to Harald Sitter and it was made available as a GSoC project. My aim is to make Karton a native Qt-Quick/Kirigami virtual machine manager, using a libvirt backend. Through libvirt, lower-level tasks can be abstracted and it allows for the app to be potentially cross-platform.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit more in detail in my GSoC project proposal (although a bit outdated).

My Work so Far

I originally became interested in the project back in February this year where I tested out GNOME Boxes, virt-manager, and UTM. I also experimented on the virsh CLI, configuring some virtual machines through the libvirt domain XML format.

My first merge request was a proof-of-concept rewrite of the app. I implemented new UI components to list, view, configure, and install libvirt-controlled virtual machines. This used the libvirt API to fetch information on user domains, and wrapped virt-install and virtviewer CLIs for installing and viewing domains respectively. I had spent a big portion of this time getting know Qt frameworks, libvirt, and just C++ overall, so a big thank you to Harald Sitter and Gleb Popov, who have been reviewing my code!

A few weeks later I also made a smaller merge request building off of my rewrite, adding QEMU virtual disk path management which is where the main repository stands as of now.

In between my school terms in mid-April, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Plasma Sprint in Graz where I was able to meet many awesome developers who work on KDE. During this time, I worked on a merge request to implement a domain installer (in order to replace the virt-install command call). This used the libosinfo GLib API to detect a user-provided OS installer disk image, getting specifications needed for the libvirt XML domain format. Karton is then able to generate a custom XML file which will make it easier to work off of and implement more features in the future. I had to rework a lot of the domain configuration class structure and shifted away from fetching information from libvirt API calls to parsing it directly from XML.

A libvirt domain XML configuration generated by Karton.

A Video Demo

Current Works in Progress

As virt-install is very powerful program, my installer is still hardcoded to work with QEMU and I haven’t been able to implement a lot of the device configuration yet. I also am currently working on addressing feedback on this merge request.

Recently, I also started work on a new custom Qt-Quick virtual machine viewer. It connects to virtual machines through the spice-client-glib library and renders the frames on a QQuickItem with the images it receives from the active virtual machine. This is still very buggy and has yet to support user input.

a very cursed viewer…

Warning: Karton is still under development. I would not recommend running Karton with any VMs that are important as they may break.

My Plans for Google Summer of Code ‘25

Once the domain installer is finished up, I think the majority of my time will be spent on working on and polishing the virtual machine viewer.

Some of the other things I would want to get to during the summer are:

• Support snapshotting, so users can save the state of their virtual machines.
• Rework the UI so that it uses space more effectively, possible more similar to UTMs layout.
• System monitor to graph CPU and RAM usage of VMs, similar to virt-manager.
• Other configuration options for the installer to support device passthrough and such.
• A bunch of more stuff mentioned in the project proposal!

If you have any features you’d like to see in the future, let us know in our Matrix, karton:kde.org!

That’s all!

Thanks for reading! I’m still new to KDE development and virtualization in general, so if you have any suggestions or thoughts on the project, please let me know!

Email: derekhongdalin@gmail.com

Matrix: @kenoi:matrix.org

Discord: kenyoy

I also made a Mastodon recently: mastodon.social/@kenoi