KDE Applications 20.08 Released with Many Improvements to Dolphin, Konsole, and More

KDE Applications 20.08

The KDE Project released today the KDE Applications 20.08 open-source office suite as the August 2020 apps update, but, in fact, a massive release that brings countless improvements and new features.

KDE Applications 20.08 marks the end of life of the KDE Applications 20.04 series and it’s here to bring your KDE apps to the next level, implementing numerous new features and improving existing functionality to many of your favorite apps, including Dolphin, Konsole, Yakuake, Digikam, Kate, Elisa, KStars, Okular, Gwenview, and more.

Highlights include support for the Dolphin file manager to show thumbnails for 3D Manufacturing Format (3MF) files, show previews of files and folders stored on encrypted filesystems like Plasma Vaults, let users easily identify files and folders with long names, remember and restore the last location you were viewing, opened tabs and split views, as well as to mount ISO images.

Also new in Dolphin are actions to allow users to quickly copy or move selected files in split view from one pane into the folder of the other pane. Moreover, the file manager now features a new “Copy Location” menu item to let you easily copy the current location, displays user-friendly names for remote and FUSE mounts, and makes it easier for users to expand its functionality by allowing them to install new plugins through the “Get new thing” window.

The Konsole terminal emulator received much-needed attention too during the development of KDE Applications 20.08 and it brings some exciting new features, including the ability to copy the full path of a file or directory and paste it into another app or terminal, the ability to display a subtle highlight for new lines when the terminal output is rapidly scrolling, as well as to show thumbnail previews of image files when hovered with the mouse cursor.

Konsole also now lets you open files with a certain app directly from the terminal window, monitor a tab’s currently active process, assign colors to tabs to more easily identify them, and disable the split view headers in split view mode. Also, the I-beam cursor now automatically adapts to the system font size.

Talking about terminal emulators, the Yakuake drop-down terminal now features a new system tray that appears when the app is running, lets users configure all the keyboard shortcuts that come from Konsole, and works better under Wayland.

The Kate text editor received support for displaying documents opened from the command line or other sources in the “Open Recent” menu and it now always opens new tabs on the right. The Elisa music player can now display all albums, artists and genres in the sidebar, as well as to display the progress of the currently playing song in the playlist.

Also updated in this release is the KStars astronomy app, which received support for the Bahtinov mask to let users to manually focus small astronomical telescopes for more accuracy, a new “Calibration Plot” subtab to display mount positions that have been recorded during internal-guider calibration.

Last but not least, the KRDC remote desktop app now shows proper server-side cursors in VNC, the Okular document viewer now displays the “Print” and “Print Preview” menu items next to each other, and the Gwenview image viewer makes it easier to crop multiple images to the same size.

Also included in the KDE Applications 20.08 release is the digiKam 7.0 image editor and organizer with its improved face detection features and countless improvements, Skanlite 2.2.0 with a new D-Bus interface for hotkeys and scanning control, Okteta 0.26.4 with support for castxml for struct2osd, and an improved Spectacle screenshot utility with better Wayland support and the ability to no longer include the mouse cursor by default in screenshots.

The KDE Applications 20.08 software suite will soon make its way into the stable software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions that ship the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment, including KDE neon, Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and others. Make sure you update your installations as soon as the new packages are available for the next level KDE apps experience!

Last updated 4 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com