The KDE project has released a development update detailing improvements planned for Plasma 6.7, introducing a new method for typing characters not directly available on physical keyboards.
Plasma 6.7 will offer a press-and-hold typing feature, enabling users to access alternative characters by holding supported keys, similar to mobile keyboards. It is part of the plasma-keyboard module and can be enabled in System Settings under Keyboard, then Virtual Keyboard. When activated, holding a key displays its associated alternative characters.
On top of that, Plasma 6.7 will also support installing custom sound themes from downloaded files. The Global Menu widget will now display the menu of the active window, even if the window is on another screen. This behavior is configurable, so users can retain the previous setting if preferred.
Additional interface refinements include improved navigation in the System Tray’s Clipboard and Networks widgets, where the standard back button now returns to the previous page, eliminating duplicate navigation controls. Notifications for newly connected USB printers have also been simplified, with the system now displaying only one notification.
On the window management side, when tiling two adjacent windows, they will now be centered within the available space, excluding desktop panels, instead of compressing the window nearest the panels.
The update includes a workaround for an upstream Electron issue that caused system tray icons from different Electron applications to share the same settings. Although the bug is fixed upstream, many Electron apps have not yet adopted the fix. Plasma now provides its own solution to prevent this issue.
Technical improvements include enhanced handling of screencasting and remote desktop requests from sandboxed applications through xdg-desktop-portal-kde. Systems with multiple GPUs will now operate more reliably if one GPU lacks OpenGL 3D acceleration, ensuring capable GPUs continue to provide acceleration.
For more information, refer to the “This Week in Plasma” post on the KDE Blogs.
Image credits: KDE
