KDE Gear 21.08

[Posted August 13, 2021 by jake]

The KDE project has announced the release of KDE Gear 21.08, which updates the over 200 apps that are part of the project. The announcement highlights updates in many of the desktop tools that KDE Plasma users are accustomed to, including the Okular document viewer, the Dolphin file manager, Elisa music player, and Gwenview image viewer. The Konsole terminal application got updated as well:

Text terminals are intimidating to people who are new to Linux. But knowing just a bit about how to use them (no, you don’t need to know how to program) gives you a level of control over your machine difficult to achieve any other way.
This is doubly true when using Konsole, KDE’s very powerful spin on the classic text terminal. In fact, calling Konsole a “terminal emulator” and leaving it at that is not fair. Take Konsole’s preview feature, for example, type white, red, blue or salmon at the command line, hover the cursor over the word, and a box will appear displaying the color. You can also use HTML color codes, like #1d99f3 and get a preview of the KDE blue color.
Previews extend to images and folders: hover the cursor over an image filename in a list in Konsole and a thumbnail will pop up showing you a preview. Hovering over a folder will show you a preview of its contents. This is very useful when you want to make sure you are copying, moving, or erasing the right thing.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 7:42 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (15 responses)

xterm!

Sorry. I can't help it. I have tried quite a few of those terminal emulators. I've always come back to xterm. It just does what it's expected to, doesn't play tricks on me and talks fluently Unicode.

What's not to like?

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 8:12 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (11 responses)

In the late 1990s, I was perfectly happy with xterm.

I am no longer perfectly happy with xterm. There are several things about it that annoy me more than any shortcoming of, say, LXDE's lxterminal, and only some of them are on the list below:

uses X resources for configuration
has very limited (or if it isn't very limited, that fact is not comfortably interactively discoverable) ability to update the configuration of the running terminal
has no readily visible mechanism for snapshotting the configuration of the running terminal to a config file
defaults to a bitmap font that feels like it was designed for use on 75dpi displays

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 16:37 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (10 responses)

Also... No tabs, no right-click on urls, no reflow on resize, no profiles, no infinite scrollback. I live in konsole, and I am so happy it's still actively developed.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 7:31 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (9 responses)

OK, thanks for that list of points, which, for me, confirms that I'm not missing anything I'd like to have:

- uses X resources for configuration
To me a desirable feature, not a bug.
- has very limited [...] ability to update the configuration of the running terminal
It seems we use terminals very differently.
- has no [...] mechanism for snapshotting the configuration [...] to a config file
I /like/ X resources. Perhaps I'm weird
- defaults to a bitmap font [...]
I changed that default long time ago. X resources, you know :)
- No tabs
I find those confusing and awkward (the browser nearly /forces/ me to use them, so I have the chance to try) But my window manager is most probably different from yours.
- no right-click on urls
Luckily
- no reflow on resize
Pretty useless for commands whose output is aware of window size (try `ls')
- no profiles
X resources
- no infinite scrollback
10000 is pretty near infinite. For more, less is better.

So yep, thanks. I'm definitely an Xterm user.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 20:21 UTC (Mon) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link] (1 responses)

Sounds like XTerm needs a "Hey kids! Get off my lawn!" feature. B-)

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 10:09 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

No need. One of the nice features of xterm is that it's so unfashionable, that it is not taken over by people who want to "improve" it (e.g., along the lines suggested by mpr22 and halla), unlike some other formerly trusty tools that have been "improved" and broke my scripts or workflows. And I am happy that there is stuff like konsole and gterm that these people can "improve".

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 14:44 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (5 responses)

> I /like/ X resources. Perhaps I'm weird

Perhaps ;) To me they've reached an inscrutable level of baroque complications. I could do without a configuration GUI, but please give me an app-specific vaguely-toml-like config file.

> - no profiles
> X resources

How do you get profile-like functionality (switching between different config sets) with X resources ?

> - no reflow on resize
> Pretty useless for commands whose output is aware of window size (try `ls')

Still very useful with `ls` and the likes. Your output doesn't disappear when you resize, that's the point.

> 10000 is pretty near infinite. For more, less is better.

Agreed (though I've missed some stuff with 10K scrollback and now use 50K).
Now wouldn't that huge scrollback buffer more valuable if your terminal had a decent search feature ? ;)

> - No tabs
> - no right-click on urls
> It seems we use terminals very differently.

While you may not need this or that feature 99% of the time, it's great to have it when you need it. To me, other Konsole "killer features that I rarely use" include changing the character encoding, duplicating input to multiple tabs, splitting views, or quickly getting the font size just right for my current level of eye fatigue or shared screen presentation.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 15:12 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

Hm. I get most of this with tmux (split windows, synchronized input, scrollback, etc.). The font switching is obviously outside of its control, but urxvt has some modicum of support for switching at runtime. That's rare enough today that it's not too bad, though I suspect that will change as I age.

I can't say I've ever wanted to change the encoding, but I also rarely interact with non-Latin scripts (meaningfully).

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 10, 2021 19:55 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

tmux's scrollback is not good enough! ;) While I'm very happy to see konsole gaining split panes (how long's it had that?) I remain welded to terminator because it uses a nice feature added to vte a while back: your scrollback is compressed, encrypted and written to a deleted file (by default) in /tmp, so that infinite scrollback can be as infinite as your disk space and you don't need to worry about it running you out of memory. I have personally ended up with hundreds of megabytes of scrollback in a single tab -- yes, searching in there takes a few seconds, but it's a lot better than not having the content to search at all.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 11, 2021 3:01 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I guess I don't use the scroll back as much. Usually I'm cognizant enough to remember to pipe to less when I need to, but I haven't noticed a need for hundreds of mega at least. I also tend to open new panes and shells a lot, so I don't have many long-lived ones that aren't in mutt or nvim either.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 11, 2021 10:41 UTC (Sat) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> I remain welded to terminator because it uses a nice feature added to vte a while back: your scrollback is compressed, encrypted and written to a deleted file (by default) in /tmp, so that infinite scrollback can be as infinite as your disk space and you don't need to worry about it running you out of memory.

Konsole has a similar feature. If you set the scrollback buffer to infinite it is written to a deleted file in (by default) ~/.cache/konsole. It is not not compressed and encrypted, but otherwise the feature seems identical.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Sep 15, 2021 12:28 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The encryption, at least, is fairly important: without it, if /tmp is not a tmpfs, anyone stealing your machine later on and looking at unallocated portions of its disk will have access to large chunks of unencrypted scrollback. The vte developers thought this was a fairly bad thing... the compression is just useful because console output is terribly repetitive. (Doing both is surely harmful to the encryption, but these aren't national security secrets we're writing out here.)

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 15:44 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

The single feature that made me stop using xterm over a decade ago was scrollback search.

Namely, that it doesn't have it, and every other terminal does.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 9:56 UTC (Thu) by gip (subscriber, #20897) [Link] (2 responses)

What I'd like to see in Konsole is a way to change the behaviour of the mouse pointer: turning into that almost invisible thing (and really invisible after 5 sec) means I spend a lot of time looking for the cursor as I work almost all the time in one of the Konsole window I have (with a few tabs each).
I had to learn to use CTRL-PgDw/PgUp to switch tabs as I cannot find the damn pointer!

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 13:50 UTC (Thu) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

If using Kwin, try enabling the "system settings -> desktop effects -> track mouse" effect. It'll make your cursor very visible when pressing the configured keys. Useful outside of Konsole too.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 19, 2021 22:35 UTC (Thu) by gip (subscriber, #20897) [Link]

Thanks, this makes things a little better.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 13:41 UTC (Sat) by mikegold10 (guest, #126967) [Link] (2 responses)

And as always they are completely incompetent:

https://download.kde.org/stable/release-service/21.04/src

404 - Page not found

How can you have faith in an environment that can't even get their primary release page linked from their own release notes to work properly?

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 15:48 UTC (Sat) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

That comment says more about you as a person than it does about the KDE project, especially over such an inconsequential mistake. Calling a whole group of people names is really not what I want to read here. Please stop.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 14, 2021 16:01 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Here's the link for you:
https://download.kde.org/stable/release-service/21.08.0/src/

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 10:08 UTC (Sun) by vivo (subscriber, #48315) [Link] (13 responses)

wow, the two previous comment openers are both negative, and that's 100% of the comment openers.
Why is that? Maybe KDE is perceived as an European project?
Well, in that case be informed that it's actually a really global one with hundreds of people from all around the world contributing.

Since we are here let me state that personally linux + KDE is the best OS in the wild, nothing compare to it, Apple, Microsoft, RedHat, none of them has been able to make something comparable in functionality and usability.

Nothing is perfect but KDE makes it's bugs bearable and consider bug as bug not features

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 10:21 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

I think the problem is the same as the vi/emacs wars. Certainly Gnome seems to be a very marmite UI, but it's also the dominant UI. Personally I hate it.

Cue a lot of religious fanatics on both sides trying to "persuade" people to swap :-) Unfortunately that's life - you see it everywhere, not just in Free/Open software ...

Cheers,
Wol

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 12:57 UTC (Mon) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (4 responses)

I had to look it up.

A marmite (slang) thing means that either you love it or hate it.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 20:03 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

I've heard that Marmite (yeast extract) is banned in the US. It's very much a Brit thing. And in Oz they have Vegemite.

But because they are both very distinctive tastes (and very strong), yes it is a case of it divides people. And the manufacturer plays on that :-)

Cheers,
Wol

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 23:07 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

> I've heard that Marmite (yeast extract) is banned in the US.

It's not.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 17, 2021 14:21 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I am expecting they are thinking of Bovril which was banned during the BSE outbreaks in Britain.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 17, 2021 7:53 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link]

Oh you are talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmite

I wasn't aware of that.

I always thought that marmite was a big metallic ball where food is cooked. I believed that the word had french origin due to Asterix. After all the marmite is where the magic portion is made in Asterix.

Apparently I was right on this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmite_(cooking_dish)

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 17, 2021 5:50 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

I've been spending quite a lot of time in Windows 10 lately and I can confidently state that Windows has now become just a pale imitation of KDE. Basically, KDE took what was good from Windows and Nix, combined them elegantly and went on to improve from there (overlooking for the moment the disaster that was KDE 4.0).

Basically, the number of WTF moments in KDE is way less than Windows. The vast majority of the time you hardly even notice it, it just lies under your fingers exactly as a good desktop should. And when you do need/want to customize it, the knobs you need are almost always there, with a good deal of thought obviously put into just how those features are presented.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 11:42 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> wow, the two previous comment openers are both negative, and that's 100% of the comment openers.
> Why is that?

Doesn't seem all that different from GNOME articles, honestly. It takes "haters" seconds to pick something to nitpick, but those who actually like it might actually take their time to evaluate.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 18:02 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

> wow, the two previous comment openers are both negative, and that's 100% of the comment openers.
> Why is that?
Because two random people on the net decided to post negative comments. How is this something that needs an explanation??

> Nothing is perfect but KDE makes it's bugs bearable and consider bug as bug not features
Really? Then why is their Wayland support such a dumpster fire? It just crashes all the time. Instead they get excited about thumbnails and colour previews in a terminal emulator. Like anyone cares.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 19:03 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

If KDE Wayland "crashes all the time" then you can probably tell an easy way to reproduce a crash. I haven't been able to do that. I have had some other gripes with it, but no crashes for a long time.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 21:55 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> If KDE Wayland "crashes all the time" then you can probably tell an easy way to reproduce a crash.
No, I went back to X11 due to the constant crashing.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 7:25 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

Funny how you interpret things.

I assume mine is one of the "negative" comment openers you are referring to.

I consider myself deeply European, having been born in one EU country and living in another, speaking fluently three-and-a-half European languages.

Not everything is about "nationalist wars", luckily :-)

The other interpretation, that of KDE vs Gnome downstream also falls short, alas, as I was advocating for xterm: I did try Gnome terminal for a while.

Actually, at the beginning, I was more or less in the Gnome backwaters, up until... Gnome 2.

What I actually admire about X is what is best describe by their phrase that they provide "mechanism, not policy". That's what I miss in those over-complex DEs and their frameworks, which seem like a fractally twisted mille-feuille [1] of mechanism and policy on top of each other. But that's me.

And here we are at that other: "negative". You can only perceive that as negative if you tacitly assume that everyone else /has/ to like what you do. I'm saying: be happy with your KTerm. Let me be happy with my xterm.

If you squint that way, it's not negative at all :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille-feuille

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 16, 2021 11:03 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

What I actually admire about X is what is best describe by their phrase that they provide "mechanism, not policy". That's what I miss in those over-complex DEs and their frameworks,

Providing policy is one of the main points (perhaps the main point) of having a DE in the first place. Without a well-designed DE, you're basically where X11 was in the late 1980s, with every application providing its own look and feel and no consistency between any two of them. KDE (and GNOME) exist basically in order to fill that void.

X11 at first left out “policy” mostly to be able to gain traction in the industry. The people behind it realised that they would be unlikely to get the likes of DEC, Sun, etc. (some of whom had their own horses in the race already) to standardise on a complete common DE from the get-go, and so they concentrated instead on providing a means for different DEs to interoperate. This approach was then touted as a “feature”. They deliberately left the details of “look and feel” (IOW, policy) to the individual OS manufacturers. Common-DE efforts such as OSF/Motif and, indeed, KDE and GNOME, only came along later.

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 12:48 UTC (Sun) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

hover the cursor over an image filename in a list in Konsole and a thumbnail will pop up showing you a preview.

When will get the first CVE for a vulnerability in Konsole trying to preview a specially crafted image file? Also sounds really annoying if an image filename gets under the cursor while scrolling back in Konsole and the preview will hide the (important) text...

KDE Gear 21.08

Posted Aug 15, 2021 20:32 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

Never? There's probably some image files that can cause vulnerabilities when viewed in Konsole, but the problem is going to be in the shared infrastructure that Konsole uses, so the KDE image viewer would have the same problem and quite possible, if the problem goes to a parent library, every single application on the system that supports that image format.

Image preview can be disabled

Posted Aug 16, 2021 14:07 UTC (Mon) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775) [Link]

You can turn image preview off in Konsole → Settings → Configure Konsole → Thumbnails.

I find them distracting, so I turn them off.

The way that KDE lets users customize things is one of the reasons I choose to use it whenever possible.