KDEMar 14

"This Week in Plasma" brings the news that...

You can use long-presses on your regular keyboard to access alternative glyphs—just like on your phone, e.g. press and hold down [$] and a popup appears that let's you choose between €, £, ¥, ¢, ₹. Also new is that you can download and install alternative sound themes and that we reduced CPU and GPU load for full-screen windows on screens using more fractional scale factors, and much more!

https://blogs.kde.org/2026/03/14/this-week-in-plasma-press-and-hold-for-alternative-characters/

#desktop #FreeSoftware #openSource

Show threadHeals Mar 15

@kde has anyone implementing this ever made use of the ancient rite of "key-repeat"? It's great if you want to insert a character multiple times without having to repeatedly press the key.. or.. well.. it was until KDE.

/cc @vyr

Show threadDaniël Franke Mar 15
@heals @kde @vyr Knowing kde, there will be a setting to turn this on and off.
Show threadHeals Mar 15

@ainmosni knowing @kde it'll be named unintuitively, hidden deep in the guts of the settings and the "new cool behaviour" will be on by default..

(And - without looking at the implementation details - the approach feels very EN focussed where most other languages have up to 3 symbols per key I'm not sure a long press is especially useful (hi ISO-Level3 shift: "8, (, {"))

/cc @vyr

Show threadDaniël Franke Mar 15
@heals @kde @vyr Kde has improved loads on settings usability and defaults front, it’s definitely not as messy as it used to be. And it’s nice to actually have options when the default behaviour doesn’t suit you.
Show threadHeals Mar 15
@ainmosni fair I guess but still one of the weirder touchscreen features to adopt given how many things it’ll break just be existing.. (hi, hjkl editor movement)
Show threadDaniël Franke 
@heals Yeah, which would make me quite surprised if they make it a default, or at least, if it stays default after a beta of it being default.
Mar 15 at 1:11pmWeb