Since the last update two months ago KDE Itinerary got support for manually added train and bus trips, a more flexible alternative connection search, a new departure details view and a better location search, among many other improvements.

New Features

Manual trip entry

Being able to manually enter train or bus trips rather than selecting them from timetable data has been often requested and is now finally available.

For all modes of transportation there’s now two modes, manually entered data where you can freely change departure and arrival locations and times, and schedule-backed data for trips added from public transport searches where you can change the departure and arrival stops only based on what’s actually in the schedule.

The latter is now also available for ferry trips.

The the various add and import actions have also been consolidated in a single menu on the trip page. Importing backups remains available on the My Data page.

Generalized alternative connection search

The alternative connection search is no longer limited to just trains and busses either, it now can also be applied to ferry trips and flights. Likewise all modes of transportation in the result can be added that way, that is also ferries and flights.

Additionally, the alternative connection search now allows to select any transfer stop as the destination, unlike previously being limited to just the first or the last one.

New public transport departures view

There’s also an entirely new and much more detailed public transport departures view. You’ll find that behind the new context menu on locations in the details pages.

The departure list now automatically updates when looking at current departures. Also, you can select an individual entry to get a whole set of additional information where available:

• Service notes and alerts.
• Occupancy levels.
• The full trip run in a schedule view and and as a map.
• The exact departure location on an indoor station map.

Events

Earlier this month we had the first Transitous Hack Weekend covering many topics relevant for Itinerary as well, ranging from making Transitous long-term sustainable over improving the data coverage and quality to expanding the routing capabilities.

There’s two important upcoming events:

• KDE Akademy 2025, September 6-11, Berlin, Germany.

• Open Transport Community Conference 2025, October 17-18, Vienna, Austria.

Infrastructure Work

Everything mentioned in this section also benefits KTrip.

Geocoding

Geocoding is the process that happens behind the location search for journey planning. That produced some confusing and undesired results in the past, and should noticeably improve with the 25.08 release.

• MOTIS, Transitous and KPublicTransport gained support for geographic bias areas for geocoding queries. That’s used in the location search based on the selected country. With this you should now always have results from the right country at the top, while still not having a hard filter which can be inconvenient in border areas.

• Improved automatic backend selection for geocoding. This should fix the issue that in some countries locations were only searched in a few small regions rather than the entire area. Italy and the US were affected by this for example.

• The city, region and country a result is in are now display in more cases in a second line under the address or station name. This should further help to disambiguate results.

Online updates for public transport backend configurations

Access to public transport data still depends on over 70 operator services, besides Transitous. Many of those aren’t really meant for 3rd party use and thus have no proper change management, which means they can randomly change their URL, need a new custom certificate, need new or changed parameters or just disappear entirely.

Adapting to a lot of that is merely a matter of changing configuration files part of KPublicTransport, but so far it would take up to a month for those changes to reach users of release packages.

As this can severely impact the functionality we now have the infrastructure to update the KPublicTransport backend configuration files as well as supporting data such as the coverage information without waiting for the next software update.

This is meant to happen automatically eventually, while we are still testing this it’s available as a context action in the public transport backend configuration page.

Pickup/dropoff constraints

Another new feature in MOTIS and Transitous are pickup and dropoff constraints. That is, a way to describe that you cannot board or cannot alight from a vehicle at a given stop. While that isn’t all that common, it can be quite important to know.

KPublicTransport also gained support for this, besides MOTIS also for OpenTripPlanner and Hafas backends. In the UI you can see this in a few places then:

• Changing the departure or arrival stop when editing only allows to select those stops that actually allow boaring/alighting respectively.
• Stops that allow neither boarding nor alighting are shown as such in the journey overview. This sometimes occurs for border crossings or Switzerland advertising significant rail infrastructure.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for Amadeus, Arriva, BlablaBus, booking.com, DB, Deutscher Alpenverein, DJH, DSB, Easyjet, Eurostar, Finnair, Flixbus, Globtour, Gopass, hostelworld, Leo Express, LeShuttle, MÁV, Opodo, Ouigo ES, Reenio, SNCB, SCNF, tickets.ua and Tito.
• Improved matching and merging of bound and unbound train/bus trips.
• Improved matching and merging of seat reservations with seats listed in different orders.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• New or fixed backend configurations for KVB, South Tyrol, ZKS and the Varsinais-Suomen OpenTripPlanner instance.
• Onboard API support for XiamenAir.
• Fix parsing of bike carriage and wheelchair accessibility capabilities from OpenTripPlanner.
• Fix parsing of flight numbers from Entur.
• Support for more vehicle features from DB.
• Correctly update country coverage list in the stop picker when enabling/disabling backends.
• Filter out journey results with implausibly long detours. This gets rid of the “creative” connections between the major stations in Paris by backends that can’t do local transport routing there.
• Fix parsing of operator names from EFA.

Train station maps

• Support for more OSM tagging schemes for elevators, tram infrastructure and platform sections.
• Improved matching of platform names when faced with language specific leading abbreviations.
• Cancel ongoing tile downloads before starting a new map load.
• Better recovery from OSM level range tagging mistakes.
• Better recovery from failed tile downloads.

Itinerary app

• Added several more export options: Wallet passes, program memberships and standalone passes can now also be exported, and single reservations can be exported as GPX file.
• Reworked journey progress display, which is now active in all journey views and should be much more reliable especially in the timeline view.
• Standalone Wallet passes can now also be updated explicitly when containing an online update URL.
• Improved default zoom in the journey and trip map views.
• Fixed display of addresses with unresolved ISO 3166-2 region codes.
• Determine a correct trip end time in more cases.
• Fixed price display when there’s no home country configured.
• Also show notes/service alerts in the stop info dialog on the journey map.
• Fixed handling of Wallet passes with a case-sensitive identifier.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

See also the recent posts on how you can add public transport data to Transitous and do OSM indoor mapping.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week something was merged for Plasma 6.5 that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time: automatic day/night theme switching! And that's not all; we’ve got more visual customizability on offer too, plus a bunch more UI improvements and bug fixes. Check it all out here:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.5.0

You can now have Plasma automatically switch to a different Global Theme at night! (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

You can now choose which Global Themes are shown on System Settings’ Quick Settings page, and turn on automatic day/night switching from there, too! (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

You can now choose to always see the light or dark variants of wallpapers that include both. Now there should be enough options for anyone: you can set dynamic wallpaper coloration to be based on the color scheme, based on the time of day, always light, or always dark. (David Redondo, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.4

If you’re a person who prefers to drag things to your panel itself rather than to a Task Manager widget, those panel icons are now removable via their context menus. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

On Wayland, files opened from KRunner in an already-running app now raise that app’s window as expected. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

On Wayland, the Orca screen reader now reads out changes to the Caps Lock state. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Moved System Settings’ Screen Edges pages into the Display & Monitor group, because it feels more natural to group it with screens than with the type of input device used to trigger its features. (Nate Graham, link)

If your system is set up for hibernation, you can now hibernate from the SDDM login screen. (Tobias Leupold, link)

Clicking “Connect” on a network in the Networks popup now closes any other open password fields for other networks, so there’s only one visible at a time. (Arnav Rawat, link)

Re-phrased the sorting/alignment options in Plasma’s desktop icon configuration window to make it clearer what they do. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.4

Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to freeze when spammed with many notifications containing images. (Paul Geerken, link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to crash while loading stuff. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a bug in Plasma’s desktop that prevented dragging-and-dropping things inside folders while the desktop was scrollable. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a bug that caused panel editing via drag-and-drop to break in hilarious/awful ways when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed several bugs in Plasma’s desktop that would cause icons to shift around on their own due to changing the screen arrangement or having certain combinations of panel and desktop file alignment settings. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a bug in Discover that caused it to get confused about which version of a Flatpak app was considered unstable or outdated when the system has multiple Flatpak remotes set up. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed two bugs involving renaming desktop files: one that made it impossible to rename symlinks to desktop files installed at the system level or generally without write permission, and another one that made rename jobs sometimes just kind of fail. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug that prevented Plasma widget configuration windows from restoring their saved sizes as expected. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed a bug that caused you to have to leave System Settings’ Colors page and then go back to it after creating a copy of a color scheme, because it didn’t show up immediately. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed two cases where Plasma could crash in Activities-related functionality. (Daniel Hast, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug in the free space checker that would cause it to inappropriately try to mount unmounted network shares defined in /etc/fstab, which could lead to hangs when there was no network connectivity. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed a bug in System Settings’ Region & Language page that caused a visual glitch when using the system with a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.17

Fixed a regression that made it impossible to drag files from Plasma’s desktop on one screen to another one. The fix for this also fixed some bugs in Dolphin, too. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)

Qt 6.8.4

Fixed a Qt bug that caused KWin on X11 to sometimes consume excessive CPU resources when locking or turning off the screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 23 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 28 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed a bug that could cause the plasmawindowed developer tool to crash when viewing the System Tray widget. (Chris Xiong, link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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; many other opportunities exist!

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-31.

Europe’s Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis

Tags: tech, cloud, vendor-lockin, politics

A change in culture and political will is indeed necessary. The relationship between organisations and US cloud providers isn’t healthy.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-self-inflicted-cloud-crisis/

The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

Tags: tech, self-hosting, criticism

There is some truth to this. Self-hosting isn’t for everyone just for the skills and compromises it requires. We need more widely available solutions without the corporate overlords.

https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/

A dive into open chat protocols

Tags: tech, foss, communication, xmpp, matrix

Very interesting stuff. This doesn’t give a very cheerful picture of the current state though. Can a XMPP revival be in the cards? That would be an interesting outcome.

https://wiki.alopex.li/ADiveIntoOpenChat

A month using XMPP (using Snikket) for every call and chat

Tags: tech, xmpp, messaging, foss, self-hosting

It’s nice to see there are turn key solutions for hosting your own XMPP server nowadays. And the community behind this one even improve on the mobile applications.

https://neilzone.co.uk/2023/08/a-month-using-xmpp-using-snikket-for-every-call-and-chat/

Ethersync

Tags: tech, tools, syncing, realtime, collaborative

Looks like a nice tool for real-time collaboration on files.

https://ethersync.github.io/ethersync/

I want to defend Wayland here…

Tags: tech, linux, graphics, wayland

That’s a good point too often overlooked by people complaining at Wayland. It indeed enable form factors and uses cases that we couldn’t address with X11.

https://ordinary.cafe/@technobaboo/114935252929285259

Loading credentials from Bitwarden with direnv

Tags: tech, secrets, shell, tools

This is a nice trick for keeping your secrets safe while having them handy when needed.

https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/07/28-direnv-bitwarden-integration/

The Bard and The Shell

Tags: tech, shell, learning, funny

Neat little introduction to use your shell properly.

https://journal.bsd.cafe/2025/07/28/the-bard-and-the-shell/

Heredocs Can Make Your Bash Scripts Self-Documenting

Tags: tech, shell, scripting, documentation

This is really a neat trick. We should have more such self-documenting scripts indeed.

https://holdtherobot.com/blog/heredocs-can-make-your-bash-scripts-self-documenting/

Using fortune to reinforce habits

Tags: tech, tools, command-line, learning, habits

This is indeed a nice way to setup some new habits on the command line.

https://www.judy.co.uk/blog/using-fortune-to-reinforce-habits/

Type safe handles in C++

Tags: tech, programming, design, type-systems, c++

This is still a valid approach. I regularly encounter cases where the type tag pattern would have been welcome.

https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_05_06_type_safe_handles.html

C++26 Reflections adventures & compile time UML

Tags: tech, c++, metaprogramming

This really unlocks interesting features in the C++ space.

https://www.reachablecode.com/2025/07/31/c26-reflections-adventures-compile-time-uml/

Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions

Tags: tech, shader, mathematics, graphics

Nice explanation on the options for anti-aliasing when rendering using SDFs

https://blog.pkh.me/p/44-perfecting-anti-aliasing-on-signed-distance-functions.html

Rewriting the heart of our sync engine

Tags: tech, architecture, syncing

Good insight into why Dropbox rewrote its sync engine for desktop clients.

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine

Broccoli: Syncing faster by syncing less

Tags: tech, syncing, compression

A follow up on the Dropbox sync engine rewrite, or why they introduced brotli compression.

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-broccoli–syncing-faster-by-syncing-less

The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake

Tags: tech, programming, architecture, object-oriented, type-systems, history

A talk from Casey Muratori who is pushing his ideas on software architecture. This one is very interesting on the long history detour it does. Shows well how we keep rediscovering stuff which sometimes go back to the early times of computer science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI

Looking at TDD: An Academic Survey

Tags: tech, tests, tdd, research

A nice little survey of what the academia already had to say about TDD a few years ago. Clearly the outcome seems mostly positive.

https://medium.com/@jitterted/looking-at-tdd-an-academic-survey-956a80545713

YAGNI

Tags: tech, design, architecture, xp, agile

It’s likely the best explanation of the YAGNI acronym I know. Explains quite well when it applies or not.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Yagni.html

WIP Limit Panic Sheet – what to do when you feel tempted to break the work-in-progress (WIP) limit

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, kanban

Nice check list, there’s more to project life than churning out tickets.

https://thought-bubble.co.uk/blog/2013/11/11/wip-limit-panic-sheet-what-to-do-when-you-feel-tempted-to-break-the-limit/

Enterprise Agility??

Tags: tech, agile, business, criticism

Looks like another certification circus is about to begin…

https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-w025/y/y/

Your Daily Scrum is Killing Your Team

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, team

Don’t just blindly apply dailies. Make sure they really solve a problem in your team.

https://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/your-daily-scrum-is-killing-your-team

It’s an Experiment

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, change, habits

You have to be willing to experiment and adjust in order to truly be agile. Otherwise you indeed just do dailies and call yourself agile.

https://toolshed.com/2015/05/its-an-experiment.html

Retromat - Inspiration & plans for (agile) retrospectives

Tags: tech, agile, retrospective, tools

Neat tools to keep retrospective fresh. If people settle too much in habits they quickly become dull.

https://retromat.org/

The 3 Motivational Forces of Developers

Tags: tech, programming, team, motivation, management

This is still a good framework to think about what motivate developers in a team. Not everyone is the same.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2013/developer-motivation.php

Crappy People versus Crappy Systems

Tags: management, hr

An oldie but still a good one. Yes, the people matter but even good people won’t strive in a badly designed system.

https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/crappy_people_v.html

Let’s Kill You a Billion Times to Make You Immortal

Tags: physics

Quantum mechanics and the many world theory really are playing with your brain. Funnily enough I read an excellent novel recently based on this principle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wK4peez9zE

Bye for now!

It’s been almost two years since my last update on this project, what changed? And if you aren’t familiar with what I’ve been working on, here’s a quick recap.

The hardware

Here is a graphics tablet I bought a few years ago now, the XP-Pen Artist 22R Pro:

It has a fatal flaw that a lot of non-Wacom tablets share though, it doesn’t work that well on Linux! To be more specific, it “works” but has a few problems:

• You can’t rebind the pad buttons easily, because it starts in a “compatibility mode” that can only send pre-defined keyboard buttons.
• Using the second stylus button prevents further stylus input. (Before I fixed that, I would train myself not to press that button 🙈)
• The two dials do not function, and if they did they aren’t rebindable anyway.

That is not great, especially since it’s not the cheapest graphics tablet on the market. So it really sucks that artists can’t take advantage of all of it’s features on the best operating system. You can achieve some parity with Windows if you use XP-Pen’s proprietary user-space driver (which works on Wayland BTW.) This solution isn’t satisfying though - I want this thing to work out of the box, using open-source software ❤️

Linux

I have completed the patch for the kernel to add support for this specific tablet. After sitting it on it for a while (due to being busy with other things.) I’m happy to announce it’s merged and should be generally available in the upcoming Linux 6.17 release 🎉

Thank you to the original author Aren Villanueva who wrote the original DIGImend kernel driver. I took his work, rebased it on top of the existing uclogic driver and changed how the many keys and dials were handled among other changes. Some of this work was covered in previous entries in this series, if you’re interested.

What this means is regardless of your desktop environment, this tablet is properly initialized and all of the flaws listed in the hardware section will be fixed.

libwacom

I added a descriptor to libwacom for this tablet, which means it shows the correct configuration options under KDE Plasma and GNOME. For example, it will show that the pen has two buttons and not three (which is the fallback):

libinput

I added support for tablet dials in libinput. In layman terms, this means desktop environments like GNOME and KDE are now aware of this feature on your tablet. This has huge implications outside of this specific tablet, for example certain HUION devices also benefit from this. More information on how KDE Plasma uses this is explained in a later section.

Wayland

Thanks to work by Peter Hutterer, the Tablet protocol in Wayland now has support for tablet dials. What this means is that applications can now read tablet dial input and do whatever they want with it, like making it zoom in and out of a canvas.

KDE Plasma

Thanks to work by Nicolas Fella, KWin (the compositor in KDE Plasma) is now dial-aware and can send them to Wayland-enabled applications beginning in Plasma 6.4. Because of the aformentioned lack of application support however, I added a feature in KDE Plasma 6.5 to rebind dials to custom user actions:

The XP-PEN software allows you to do this too, so having a built-in solution in KDE Plasma would be great! I did just that, and added support for rebinding dials which will show up in the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.5 release. Making them user configurable is meant as a “bridge”, as I’m not aware of any applications supporting dials yet.

With this final piece - from top-to-bottom - the entire Linux graphics tablet stack can now take advantage of relative dials like any other hardware feature 🎉

Conclusion

I want to make it clear (especially if you don’t know me) that this isn’t some hack, or a rushed driver. This is thanks to years of effort, and from multiple parties and ecosystems. I also literally use this driver and KDE Plasma for my hobbies every day, I know it works first-hand.

I also hope this series showcases that the graphics tablet infrastructure in Linux is not stagnant, but actively being worked on by super-talented people every day. In a theoretical future distribution release that has Linux 6.17 and KDE Plasma 6.5, this tablet will work out-of-the-box. (And for other hardware, it’s only a matter of time!) We can make the Linux desktop not just usable for artists, but we can executing it better than anything else out there. No more crappy driver software, tablets will work out of the box on an operating system that actually respects you ❤️

To Nicolas, Peter and Aren - you can redeem a beer or drink of choice at your earliest convenience 🍻

If this series has been fascinating for you, then I highly suggest making plans to watch my Akademy 2025 talk in Berlin or online about bridging the gap for artists using Linux and KDE Plasma. I’m going to be covering the amazing progress - especially in our KDE Plasma 6.x series - that’s relevant to artists big and small, and also discuss plans for the long road ahead. You also need to follow the KDE account on Mastodon and Bluesky if you haven’t already, where we post announcements and sometimes call-to-actions like our recent push to contribute data about graphics tablet hardware!

I also want to remind everyone that one of KDE’s current goals is about input, and as it’s Goal Champion I’ve been volunteering and organizing to fix issues like the ones seen above. If you are having trouble with your graphics tablet on the KDE Plasma Wayland session (and it’s our fault) then we want to know! Or if you’re super happy with KDE and nothing is wrong, we wouldn’t mind hearing about that was well 🐸

If you’re still addicted to me hearing me talk about improving stuff, here is a sneak peek of the hardware I’m testing in KDE Plasma next:

But that’s for another time!

Do you want to save your mental energy on solving complex coding challenges instead of fixing syntax issues in code generated by Gen AI? The Qt AI Assistant is the world's first coding assistant that seamlessly embeds a QML linter agent for the prompts you write. The latest release also comes with the ability to configure your LLM.

Intro

Apart from setting up a new open source project, it is important to understand how the application works in order to make the changes you need. In this blog I will go over how I find code, understand the application, and my progress so far with the Selection Action Bar.

Searching code

One Stop Shop for Searching

Command Line

grep -rn "<string_to_search>"

QTCreator

ctrl + f
crtl + shift + f

Debug in C++ code

qDebug() << "[Debug] <string_to_display_for_debugger> << <additional_parameters>;

Krita's codebase is massive, so don't expect to understand everything in one day. What is important is knowing how to find code you need to make the improvements you want. Above are some tools I use when looking for code. I would use the command line or QTCreator search functionality to reverse search strings that are displayed in Krita. This helps me find buttons, dropdowns, and tools. When I want to understand the functionality of the application, I will add qDebug in the code. This allows me to perform an action when Krtia is running and display debug information about the functions I added qDebug to.

Progress

Through the use of the the useful tools above, I was able to make the base UI of the floating toolbar in Krita by identifying QPainter class that created the Assistant Tool. I wanted to use Assistant tool as a reference and recreate a similar UI look. For quick learning purposes and proof of concept, when an Assistant Tool widget is active, the floating toolbar is also generated on screen.

Conclusion

Making changes in Krita can be challenging, but by using a few simple tools it can make hours turn into minutes for searching what you need. Again, "the hardest part is finding the resources to be successful". I hope this blog post helps whoever is in need of searching Krita or any C++ codebase.

Contact

To anyone reading this, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m always open to suggestions and thoughts on how to improve as a developer and as a person.
Email: ross.erosales@gmail.com
Matrix: @rossr:matrix.org

Dear friends, family, and community,

I’m reaching out during a challenging time in my life to ask for your support. This year has been particularly difficult as I’ve been out of work for most of it due to a broken arm and a serious MRSA infection that required extensive treatment and recovery time.

Current Situation

While I’ve been recovering, I’ve been actively working to maintain and improve my professional skills by contributing to open source software projects. These contributions help me stay current with industry trends and demonstrate my ongoing commitment to my field, but unfortunately, they don’t provide the income I need to cover my basic living expenses.

Despite my efforts, I’m still struggling to secure employment, and I’m falling behind on essential bills including:

• Rent/mortgage payments
• Utilities
• Medical expenses
• Basic living costs

How You Can Help

Any financial assistance, no matter the amount, would make a meaningful difference in helping me stay afloat during this job search. Your support would allow me to:

• Keep my housing stable
• Maintain essential services
• Focus fully on finding employment without the constant stress of unpaid bills
• Continue contributing to the open source community

Moving Forward

I’m actively job searching and interviewing, and I’m confident that I’ll be back on my feet soon. Your temporary support during this difficult period would mean the world to me and help bridge the gap until I can secure stable employment.

If you’re able to contribute, GoFundMe . If you’re unable to donate, I completely understand, and sharing this request with others who might be able to help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for considering helping me during this challenging time.

With gratitude, Scarlett

Intro

This week I focused on making the Selection Action Bar draggable directly on the canvas. This would let the user reposition the toolbar that is best for their workflow.

Obstacles to Implementation

Up to this point adding elements on Krita using Qt was straightforward however making these elements interact and respond to mouse click events needed some deeper diving. The goal of this part of the Selection Action Bar was to allow users to click and drag the tool to reposition it anywhere within the canvas. In order to implement this I asked myself some questions: Where does Qt handle click events? How can the UI elements dynamically update their position?

Event Filters and Mouse Events

Documentation Links https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/eventsandfilters.html
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.15/events.html
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qobject.html#installEventFilter

My research led me to Qt’s event system. One of the key concepts I learned about was event filters. Event filters are able to intercept events that are sent to another object. In our case, we can intercept the click events that are sent to the canvas and process that event to update the positions of our floating toolbar.

Since canvas was passed in through the KisSelectionAssistantsDecoration class, we can install an event filter on the canvas object, specifically the canvasWidget to intercept the mouse events.

// install event filter on canvasWidget, so KisSelectionAssistantsDecoration class (aka 'this') can look at event first
canvasWidget->installEventFilter(this);

After learning about event filters, I needed to learn how to handle the mouse events. By distinguishing user inputs of MouseButtonPress, MouseMove, and MouseButtonRelease, I was able to update the position of the floating bar. To keep things simple, imagine a rectangle on a 2D grid. Between the top left point of the rectangle and a point we click inside the rectangle is called an offset. This offset is to make sure that when we click and drag from within the rectangle, we are updating the position of the rectangle. Get offset = mouse position (click) - rectangle position
Update rectangle position = mouse position (click + drag) - offset
Mouse button release = stop updating rectangle

Working concept

With this major change, the Selection Action Bar is starting to feel like a full feature. Currently, we are able to activate selection actions, move the toolbar to a desirable position on canvas, and toggle it on and off via Krita settings.

Conclusion

This week really pushed me to explore how to handle events and how to make elements move in Krita! As I continue building out the Selection Action Bar every week, I start to understand how complex a ‘simple’ change could be. Next week I plan to improve on the movement of the toolbar by restricting its dragging area within the canvas.

Contact

To anyone reading this, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m always open to suggestions and thoughts on how to improve as a developer and as a person. Email: ross.erosales@gmail.com Matrix: @rossr:matrix.org

🎉 Clazy Now Integrates with Clang-Tidy!

I am excited to announce a major improvement to the Clazy project: Clazy now integrates seamlessly with Clang-Tidy!

🧩 One Toolchain, All the Checks

Clazy now provides a plugin (on Unix ClazyClangTidy.so) that allows all its checks to run inside clang-tidy, unifying your static analysis workflow. You no longer need to run two separate tools — just configure Clazy’s checks through clang-tidy itself.

This change needed quite a few refactorings to make the existing Clazy codebase more adaptable. In total, changes were spread out to 9 different pull requests to gradually implement the needed changes. Besides implementing the functionality, the testsuite was also adapted to ensure Clazy’s clang-tidy provides proper results.

✅ How to Use

To load the plugin:

clang-tidy -load=ClazyClangTidy.so ...

🔒 If the plugin isn’t in a standard library path, either add it to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH or provide an absolute path to the plugin file.

Unfortunately, Clang-Tidy needs to have Clazy checks enabled explicitly and does not have a concept of “levels” to group checks. While wildcards like clazy-* would also work, it enables all manual-level checks. Those have more false positives and can hurt performance.

As a helper, you can export environment variables containing the check names to concatenate the desired combination:

export CLAZY_LEVEL0=clazy-overloaded-signal,clazy-connect-by-name,clazy-connect-non-signal,clazy-qstring-comparison-to-implicit-char,clazy-wrong-qevent-cast,clazy-lambda-in-connect,clazy-lambda-unique-connection,clazy-qdatetime-utc,clazy-qgetenv,clazy-qstring-insensitive-allocation,clazy-fully-qualified-moc-types,clazy-unused-non-trivial-variable,clazy-connect-not-normalized,clazy-mutable-container-key,clazy-qenums,clazy-qmap-with-pointer-key,clazy-qstring-ref,clazy-strict-iterators,clazy-writing-to-temporary,clazy-container-anti-pattern,clazy-qcolor-from-literal,clazy-qfileinfo-exists,clazy-qstring-arg,clazy-empty-qstringliteral,clazy-qt-macros,clazy-temporary-iterator,clazy-wrong-qglobalstatic,clazy-lowercase-qml-type-name,clazy-no-module-include,clazy-use-static-qregularexpression
export CLAZY_LEVEL1=clazy-auto-unexpected-qstringbuilder,clazy-connect-3arg-lambda,clazy-const-signal-or-slot,clazy-detaching-temporary,clazy-foreach,clazy-incorrect-emit,clazy-install-event-filter,clazy-non-pod-global-static,clazy-post-event,clazy-qdeleteall,clazy-qlatin1string-non-ascii,clazy-qproperty-without-notify,clazy-qstring-left,clazy-range-loop-detach,clazy-range-loop-reference,clazy-returning-data-from-temporary,clazy-rule-of-two-soft,clazy-child-event-qobject-cast,clazy-virtual-signal,clazy-overridden-signal,clazy-qhash-namespace,clazy-skipped-base-method,clazy-readlock-detaching
export CLAZY_LEVEL2=clazy-ctor-missing-parent-argument,clazy-base-class-event,clazy-copyable-polymorphic,clazy-function-args-by-ref,clazy-function-args-by-value,clazy-global-const-char-pointer,clazy-implicit-casts,clazy-missing-qobject-macro,clazy-missing-typeinfo,clazy-old-style-connect,clazy-qstring-allocations,clazy-returning-void-expression,clazy-rule-of-three,clazy-virtual-call-ctor,clazy-static-pmf

Checks in Clang-Tidy can be disabled when prefixing them with “-“, whereas Clazy uses “no-“ prefixes. An example clang-tidy command to use all level0 checks, with overloaded-signal being disabled and the qt-keywords manual check being enabled:

clang-tidy -load=ClazyClangTidy.so \
-checks="$CLAZY_LEVEL0,-overloaded-signal,qt-keywords" \
-p my_build_dir mydir/**.cpp

In case you want to speed up linting in the project, run-clang-tidy can be used for parallel execution.

🚧✨ Limitations & Tricks

Unlike using Clazy directly, clang-tidy has its own filter mechanism to only emit warnings from files that were provided as an input. This means if a warning is emitted from a header file and not the “.cpp” file you provide as an input, Clang-Tidy will suppress it. To see those warnings -header-filter=".*" can be added to the command.

💡💬 Getting it & Feedback

The Clang-Tidy plugin is currently not released, and some additional development on various checks is happening. For trying it out, one has to compile the project from source. It is just a simple CMake setup - promise ;) See the instructions for more details: https://invent.kde.org/sdk/clazy/#build-instructions

Any feedback and contributions are appreciated - let’s make Clazy better together 😎. Please report bugs or suggestions on https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=clazy or https://invent.kde.org/sdk/clazy/-/issues.