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Xfce fan? It’s time for another issue of my exclusive “Xfce’s Apps Update” monthly roundup where I inform you about the latest releases of your favorite Xfce apps, plugins, tools, and more released during February 2023.
February 2023 was another busy month for Xfce devs as they released many new versions of popular Xfce apps and core components to bring you new features and improve reliability and stability by fixing more bugs, crashes, memory leaks, and other annoyances preventing you from fully enjoying your Xfce desktop.
Major changes were brought to the xfce4-notifyd notification daemon that implements the Freedesktop.org desktop notifications specification on Xfce, which received no less than four releases up to version 0.8.2. These include a new setting to never expire notifications, the ability to reposition notifications when the work area changes, and an improved Xfce panel icon when there are unread notifications.
Also included was an option to choose what to do when opening the plugin menu, along with an option to only show unread notifications in the plugin menu. New timestamp formatting options have been added as well and the handling of unread notifications was improved.
Also, the devs added a new “Mark All Read” button to the settings and the panel plugin, implemented a hidden setting to restore the override-redirect behavior, added the ability to update the icon when changing the icon theme, and removed support for old GTK 3.0 themes, noting that GTK 3.20 themes are always used.
Moreover, a new setting in preferences lets you change what fields are shown in notifications. Of course, many bugs and some memory leaks were fixed, and numerous language translations were updated for a better Xfce desktop notifications experience.
Ristretto 0.13.0 image viewer received printing support and proper window scaling support for the thumbnailer. The Orage time-managing application and Parole media player have finally been updated to version 4.18 for the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment series bringing Wayland support for Orage and faster hiding of the on-screen controls for Parole.
Also released in February 2023 was the Mousepad 0.6.0 text editor, a release that adds the ability to keep the saved state in memory to track the actual modification state and a new “match whole word” toggle to the search toolbar. Also, Mousepad now marks the document as modified when the line ending changes and no longer shows the menubar when releasing the Alt key if the focus is lost.
The Thunar file manager has been updated to version 4.18.4 in February, a release that adds support for handling URIs via desktop files, support for undoing the trash for linked paths, the ability to always ask the user before deleting files via undo, as well as the ability to allow the creation of symlinks on remote locations.
On top of that, Thunar no longer shows the full menu for unmounted devices, no longer opens a folder when mounting a device, focuses the right split pane on mouse click, prevents the wrong undo/redo notification, keeps directory-specific item sort details, no longer adds an extra dot when creating links, and no longer crashes when closing a window.
Several other core components and plugins were released in February 2023, including the thunar-media-tags-plugin 0.4.0 that adds ID3/OGG tag support to the Thunar bulk rename dialog, xfce4-panel 4.18.2, xfce4-session 4.18.1, which fixes blurry session snapshots, xfce4-power-manager 4.18.1, and xfce4-settings 4.18.2 fixing lots of blurry icons issues.
That’s it for my Xfce’s Apps Update roundup for February 2023. See you again in early April for another roundup and don’t forget to keep your installations up to date at all times if you want to enjoy the new features and improvements mentioned above on top of your Xfce 4.18 desktop environment.
Last updated 1 year ago
