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8 years of “This Week in Plasma”
Quoting: 8 years of “This Week in Plasma” - KDE Blogs —
Happy holidays to all in the KDE universe who celebrate them! As 2025 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to take stock.
“This Week in Plasma” began 8 years ago as a development report for KDE’s Usability & Productivity goal, which had just been democratically selected by the community in the very first round of the new KDE Goals process.
Back then it wasn’t called “This Week in Plasma” (or “TWiP” for short), but eventually it would gain and change names, and move off my personal blog and onto KDE’s infrastructure.
During these past 8 years, I’ve done my best to keep the wider KDE community informed about what’s going on almost every week! And I’m constantly amazed and humbled by the positive feedback it’s generated.
Also:
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Highlights from 2025
It’s been a few years since I did an end-of-year “highlights in KDE” post, but hopefully better late than never! 2025 was a big year for KDE — bigger than me or any of us individually.
My focus these days tends to be on Plasma, so that’s mostly what I’ll be mentioning on the technical side. And as such, everything here is just what I personally noticed, got involved with, or got excited about. Much more was always happening! Additional KDE news is available at https://planet.kde.org.
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Holiday Hacking 2025 – Kai Uwe's Blog
More than five years ago, at the peak of the pandemic, I wrote a patch to add a “Push to talk” feature to Plasma’s volume keys handler. For meetings, I even bought a cheap 8€ USB foot pedal to operate it like a bus driver! It’s basically a single button USB keyboard. Unfortunately, back then KGlobalAccel, our global shortcuts handler, couldn’t report key press vs. key release. Therefore, it was a bit of a hack abusing key auto-repeat: pressing the key, a timer was started and the microphone unmuted. Every key repeat reset the timer and only when it expired the microphone was muted again. Fortunately, nowadays we can query a global shortcut’s state and detect when it is pressed and released again. I decided to revisit the patch and made it much simpler. I hope to finally include it in Plasma 6.7 coming out next summer.
Speaking of shortcuts, Meta+P (p as in projector) lets you quickly switch between a couple of common display arrangements. For when the one you want isn’t included, there’s now a handy button in the corner to bring you to the full display settings. It has actually become my primary means of accessing them.