The KDE Project has announced KDE Gear 26.08, the latest major update to its application collection, with new features and refinements across Dolphin, Okular, Konsole, Kdenlive, Minuet, and more.
Starting with Okular, KDE’s document viewer, the two separate configuration dialogs, “Configure Backends” and “Configure Okular,” have been merged into a single settings interface, making options easier to find and manage.
Text selection has a useful improvement: triple-clicking now selects an entire line. When highlighting or underlining text, Okular automatically adds the selected text to the annotation note. In addition, notes and inline comments can now be copied and pasted within the same document or another.
Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, brings several changes. Integration with KDE Connect has improved, so when browsing files on a connected phone, users can launch KDE Connect directly using a new button at the top of the Dolphin window.
Moreover, the file manager’s Filter Bar is now more capable. Besides ordinary text filtering, Dolphin supports glob patterns and regular expressions, giving users more precise control when working with directories containing many files.
Grouping and sorting have been separated as well. Files can now be sorted alphabetically while grouped by file type. Tab management also gets a quality-of-life upgrade with new options to close all tabs to the left, right, or both sides of the selected tab.
Konsole expands its drag-and-drop capabilities; In KDE Gear 26.08, users can hold Alt and drag an underlined filename from the terminal into another application. The resulting behavior depends on the destination.
Dragging an image into an image editor opens it directly for editing, while dropping it into a text editor inserts its file path. Similar functionality applies to URLs, email addresses, and color values. For example, dropping a URL into a browser opens the page, while dragging a color code into Krita fills a layer with that color.
Kdenlive receives several workflow improvements. Its Transform effect now lets you move the rotation axis instead of forcing rotation around the center. The Gradient Map effect supports multiple gradient stops, and the Curves effect can adjust individual curves independently for more precise color work.
On the timeline, users can copy a selection directly into a new sequence. Kdenlive can automatically create additional audio tracks when clips require them. Tracks can be reordered, and different colors assigned to item types like video clips, images, and titles.
The Titler has been improved, adding copy-and-paste support for objects, rounded corners for rectangles, and snapping to screen edges, centers, and other objects with visual guides to help alignment.
KDE’s music education application Minuet arrives with a redesigned interface that works equally well on desktop and mobile devices. Its home screen and navigation drawer have been reorganized to make exercise categories easier to reach. Exercises are now displayed as cards with short descriptions.
Additionally, Minuet gains a search field that filters exercises by their translated names and descriptions. Exercise pages have been rearranged to better use the limited space on narrow windows and smartphone screens.
For more details, see the official announcement. KDE Gear 26.08 tarballs are available on the source info page for manual compilation, and the full changelog provides additional details on the update.
Most KDE Gear 26.08 apps will soon be available on Flathub and Snap Store. Rolling release distributions can expect the app collection to be added to their respective distros’ repositories in the coming days and weeks.
