Xfce’s Apps Update for November 2021: New Releases of Mousepad, Ristretto, and Whisker Menu

Xfce’s apps November 2021

The November 2021 issue of my exclusive “Xfce’s Apps Update” monthly roundup is out now and it’s packed with news about some of your favorite Xfce applications, plugins, and tools.

In November 2021, the Xfce developers managed to update the Whisker Menu plugin that provides an alternate menu for the Xfce desktop environment up to version 2.7.0. Whisker Menu 2.6.2 was released on mid-November to properly prevent interactive search in the treeview, as well as to fix menu toggling after pressing the Esc key and background shifting when showing the menu.

Whisker Menu 2.7.0 was released later in November with lots of goodies, including support for rounded profile picture, the ability to show categories as icons on top or bottom, optional AccountsService support, Catfish search action, support for CSS classes for theming, improved search result relevance.

The latest Whisker Menu release also rearranges the Settings dialog, switches to the original menu layout and uses the dm-tool for switching users, replaces slots with lambdas, as well as the size grip with resizing from edges. Various functions have been removed in version 2.7.0, which also updates several translations.

Also released in November 2021 is the Mousepad 0.5.8 simple text editor for Xfce, a release that improves Flatpak support and the search function, removes the “Page Setup” dialog from printing, and fixes various bugs.

Ristretto 0.12.1 was released as well in November 2021, a release that optimizes sorting by content type, implements asynchronous image loading, increases the image loading buffer size, revamps the file opening procedure, adds the ability to display all files in the open dialog, adds support for GLib 2.44 or later, and fixes numerous bugs.

Last but not least, November 2021 brought us xfce4-sensors-plugin 1.4.2, the sensors plugin that lets you conveniently track the status of any sensor available in your system. Apart from various bug and crash fixes, this release prevent overlap of tachometer titles, improves standalone app layout, and increases the default temperature ranges of HDDs and NVIDIA GPUs by 10℃.

Meanwhile, work on the next major Xfce release, Xfce 4.18, continues in the background and the devs released a new development version of the Thunar file manager (4.17.7), which adds the ability to customize the status bar, support for inheriting sort column/order of new tabs from the current tab, prevents replace of ACSII characters < 0 for FAT filesystems, adds support for ‘.’ in themed desktop-file names, and removes the file:// prefix from the location column.

That’s it for Xfce’s Apps Update roundup for November 2021. As usual, if you’re using the Xfce desktop environment on your GNU/Linux distribution, you should expect the new app versions to arrive in the stable software repositories in the coming days.

More details about the new application releases presented in this roundup can be found here.

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