Xfce’s Apps Update for April 2021 Improves Mousepad, Xfdashboard, and More

Xfce’s apps update April

The April 2021 issue of my exclusive Xfce’s apps update roundup continues with new releases of Mousepad, Xfdashboard, Xfce Settings, and more.

April has been quite a slow month for Xfce app development, with new releases only for the Mousepad text editor, Xfdashboard application switcher and launcher, as well as the Xfce Settings Manager and Exo library.

But, on the other hand, we got new GNU/Linux distribution releases shipping with the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment pre-installed, including Xubuntu 21.04, Fedora Linux 34, and Calculate Linux 21, so you have a greater selection of distros offering Xfce.

Mousepad was ported to GtkSourceView 4 and received new command-line options for positioning the cursor (e.g. –line/-l and –column/-c). A bunch of bug fixes and various translation updates are also present in the Mousepad 0.5.4 release.

Xfdashboard received two development releases in the 0.9.x series, which brought many interesting changes like an enhanced new color class to support linear gradients and the ability to specify colors in CSS, improved detection of apps and determine their desktop file for X11, a new “Recently Used” search provider plugin to let you searcs through a list of recently used files, as well as improved window placements.

That’s the Xfce’s apps update roundup for April 2021. You should update your installations regularly to receive these new versions as soon as they’re out and enjoy the new features and improvements. If you’re using the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, they should already be available in your distro’s repositories.

Meanwhile, the devs are working hard on the next major release, Xfce 4.18, which promises many new features to the Thunar file manager, such as the ability to create a bookmark from the ‘Go’ menu, the ability to search with case insensitive when selecting files and folders by pattern, and the ability to show the full path in the titlebar.

Moreover, Thunar in Xfce 4.18 will no longer show 4Kb or 12Kb sizes for folders in the list view, lets you sort the Trash by file deletion date, will remember the scroll bar position, add a refresh button to the toolbar, and improve the usability of the ‘Computer’ file pane.

Among other enhancements, Xfce 4.18 also promises to offer a new option in Desktop preferences to let you hide the ‘Delete’ option from the context menu of desktop files and folders. Most of these improvements were contributed to Xfce by potential students during GSoC (Google Summer of Code) 2021.

Image credits: XFCE Nation

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