7 ms·

This week in KDE: Double-click by default

44 points by LorenDB 3y ago

LordShredda 3y ago
> The minimum screen brightness is now always 1, and the minimum keyboard brightness is now always 0, ensuring that the screen backlight never turns off completely at minimum brightness, while the keyboard backlight always does (me: Nate Graham and Natalie Clarius, link 1 and link 2) Finally! I thought there was something wrong on my end. I also love how open KDE is and how almost any functionality in it can be automated.
- geokon 3y ago
  I liked that your could turn off the brightness entirely :( (Though in Kubuntu it doesn't) Not clear how you can even do that now. You can "sleep" the display but it'll turn back on when you hit any key
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    You can always set brightness to zero via the command line using any monitor ddc control tool you can find.
    - geokon 3y ago
      ... but then I don't have a shortcut to turn it back on.. lol the convenience is that most laptops have dedicated brightness keys
      - tux3 3y ago
        I think it'd still turn back on if you press brightness up, as before :) And you can make a custom shortcut that runs a brightness to zero script as well, that should work!
  - circuit10 3y ago
    Yes, being able to turn it off might be confusing for some people but it’s useful if you’re aware of it so there should be a setting
  - mmh0000 3y ago
    Make a little script, bind it to a hotkey. For me, I use Windows+S $ cat ~/bin/monitor-off.sh #!/bin/bash sleep .5 xset dpms force off Same little trick for when I lock the screen, (Settings -> Notifications -> Screen Saver -> Configure Events): cat ~/bin/LOCKSCREEN-ACTIONS.sh #!/bin/bash ## Anything that is "slow" should be run in the background otherwise lock/unlock is slowed down #Mute audio on screen lock, only if not already muted: ( if [[ "$(amixer get Master | awk '/Front Left:/ {print $NF}')" = "[on]" ]]; then amixer -q set Master mute touch "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" fi ) & #Pause foobar2000 only if playing, and make a note. ( "${HOME}/bin/foobar2000-pauseonly.sh" && touch "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" ) & #Disable all mouses (to prevent movement waking monitor.) "${HOME}/bin/set-mice-status" disable #Force monitor to sleep. "${HOME}/bin/monitor-off.sh" And finally, I have the inverse of that, which is called on screen unlock, called automatically on screen unlock (Settings -> Notifications -> Screen Saver -> Configure Events): cat ~/bin/UNLOCKSCREEN-ACTIONS.sh #!/bin/bash #Unmute audio only if muted by lockscreen: ( if [ -f "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" ]; then amixer -q set Master unmute rm -f "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" fi ) & #Enable all mouses. "${HOME}/bin/set-mice-status" enable & #Unpause foobar2000 only if paused by lockscreen. Remove note. ( if [ -f "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" ]; then "${HOME}/bin/foobar2000-playonly.sh" rm -f "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" fi ) &
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Oh cool I didn't know you could configure events. I made a script that just checks if kscreensaver is running but it always felt a bit duct tapeish. Thanks!
  - pritambaral 3y ago
    > I liked that your could turn off the brightness entirely :( Looking at the change, it seems the dbus method[1] to set brightness explicitly to a value should continue to work. A script could be assigned to the lower brightness key that uses this DBus API. Alternatively, the same DBus API also provides a signal for whenever brightness changes, and an autostart script could be written to monitor for the value 1 and immediately set it to 0. 1: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/blob/master/daemon/actions/bundled/org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.Actions.BrightnessControl.xml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/blob/master/daemo...
cricalix 3y ago
The fractional resolution fixes - yes please. I run a 1440p and 2160p pair of displays, and on Wayland I cannot turn on fractional scaling for either of them due to the graphical artifacting. X - well, I can turn on fractional scaling, but it's global, not per display. KDE's "zoom the desktop with a keystroke" is also really useful. I first saw it on a Tech Tangents stream, where he was streaming an entire desktop/screen, and simply zoomed a segment of it to show something and then reset the zoom. All without touching OBS or the Extron.
- adrm 3y ago
  Right now I am running Fedora 38 with Gnome on Wayland, enabling experimental fractional scaling, and my two 4k screens are displaying wonderfully at 1.75x. The settings app allows you to do it per-screen, and it also works fine for me. Although I mostly have the same scaling in both displays since both are equal.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Right now I am running Fedora 38 with Gnome on Wayland, enabling experimental fractional scaling, and my two 4k screens are displaying wonderfully at 1.75x. Does that scaling work/look good across other apps, outside the Gnome/GTK4 ecosystem?
    - adrm 3y ago
      Just installed Kdenlive to test, and looks fine to me!
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Does it also scale by the assigned factor or does it stay at 100% scale?
        adrm 3y ago
        The UI elements have a comparable size to the rest of the apps. I wasn't able to pick any glitches.
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
as someone who has been using kde neon exclusively for a few years now, i am very happy. I have not done any customizations beyond the wallpaper of the day and dark mode but still, there is a tonne of stuff that can be changed. I feel like the "welcome to kde" app should introduce users to the customizations they can do on the software, from themes to wallpapers to cursors to file open action and all the things. my point is, i recently gave a kde neon to a sibling. they did double click and it felt weird and they said "WTH is happening. i dont want it".. i was observing their action and i said "well you can change that behaviour. go to settings, touchpad, then double click......" what i am getting at is, there should be a way to educate users that most if not all behavour can be changed and where to expect those things to be. "point and shoot" became popular because of that reason only. point and shoot. kde is like point and shoot but can be changed. users think it is point and shoot like gnome but dont know it can be changed.
- fernandotakai 3y ago
  one thing i would totally recommend for kde is bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/ https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/ it's tiling for kde and it works REALLY well.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    It started to degrade as development has stopped and the latest few point releases of plasma started to have issues with it enabled.
IshKebab 3y ago
> Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click to open them. What was it before? I haven't used KDE since the Plasma debacle but I don't remember it getting something this basic wrong...
- shakow 3y ago
  > getting something this basic wrong... Despite the obvious vitriol of your message, I'd precise for the posterity that when KDE was created, this was not such a surprising thing to do as e.g. old Apple OS did so, and it was a commonly used option on other OSs.
  - howinteresting 3y ago
    I'm just happy KDE is changing old behaviors that are counterintuitive in the modern age. Now as for the macOS cmd-tab behavior...
- msiyer 3y ago
  there is nothing "basic" about this. something that seems pretty obvious to you may not be natural to someone else. i think the single-click navigation or opening of files was done to mimic how hyperlinks on the internet work. some people are wired that way. on the other hand, some people have a completely different brain configuration: they think that a single-click should select whereas a double-click should open a file. there are people who do not agree with both these options. maybe, they want everything to work via audio commands. how do we decide what the default behavior should be? the answer is: leave it to the user.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    > there is nothing "basic" about this It's how both major desktop OSes have worked for literally decades. It works very well. Why be different? Mimicking hyperlinks doesn't make sense because you never want to move hyperlinks around or rename them. There's rarely a reason to select a hyperlink.
  - 3y ago
cardanome 3y ago
Single-click to open is one of the few hills I am totally planning on dying on. Why click double when you can just click once? As for selecting, just have files be selected on hover. Normally, I just right-click. Double click might have maybe made sense back in the days where clicking on things was expensive and you wanted to prevent miss-clicks but these days I don't see the point. The weird thing is, that is doesn't even take much time to get used to one way or the other. On systems with double-click, I just need a few minutes to get used to it again and vice versa. Since single-click is more ergonomic and more accessible (as some people have trouble double clicking), it should be the default. The whole double-click thing seems to be some sort of weird cargo cult to me but I am willing to hear counter points.
- barnabee 3y ago
  Open is rarely the action I want most often. I use search/typing in a launcher to open documents and apps, or I’m using a command line. Mostly organising things in directories or doing other admin or secondary tasks when I’m in a file explorer application. I also tend to use list mode on the smallest zoom, and multi- and group-select items a lot, which works terribly with hover select. Single click to select makes sense as selecting one or more files is the precursor to almost every operation. With single click to open my main use case would get much harder and I’d randomly end up opening stuff I don’t want to at least some of the time. No thanks.
- aktenlage 3y ago
  > As for selecting, just have files be selected on hover. That sounds horrible. How do you do multi-(de)selection then? I tried single-click for a while, but selecting gets awkward.
  - electroly 3y ago
    While I think OP's idea isn't great, Windows seems to have an acceptable solution here: you can continue to allow drag-selection, and when clicking while holding down Ctrl/Shift you add to a selection rather than opening. The first click for the drag will be on the background and not on an icon, so it can still start a selection. This is how it works on Windows when you enable one-click.
forgotpwd16 3y ago
Find the "every poll of users I’m aware of has shown that they prefer double-click by a 2-1 or higher margin" mentioned in-article comments interesting, especially when contrasted with all other comments expressing a single-click preference.
TrianguloY 3y ago
A non written rule that most software follow is: if something changes when you hover over an item (usually meaning "select"), you only need one click to act on it. If nothing changes, you need to double click (because a single click will probably select). There are exceptions of course, but you'll realize that most software works like this, and those who don't are the ones users have more trouble adapting.
JellyBeanThief 3y ago
One of these days I'll get serious about trying to configure KDE to actually look usable. Every time I try it (about once every 1.5 years) I keep getting struck by how everything is the wrong size or is spaced incorrectly relative to everything else. Like the search field in the 4th screenshot in this article. Why are the magnifying glass and delete icons essentially flush with the edges of the field, while the search string is is an entire length of the icons away from the magnifying glass? It doesn't just look bad, it looks like a mistake. Even the title of the General pane is closer to the delete icon than the text the delete icon actually will delete. That's a particularly egregious example, but there's stuff all over the place in KDE that bugs me. In the 2nd screenshot the Start button is aligned with... nothing else at all. And it makes the part of my brain that processes design hierarchy cringe.
Tommstein 3y ago
The main thing I've learned from these comments is that apparently most people either don't have a right mouse button or don't know how to use it.

44 points by LorenDB 3y ago

> The minimum screen brightness is now always 1, and the minimum keyboard brightness is now always 0, ensuring that the screen backlight never turns off completely at minimum brightness, while the keyboard backlight always does (me: Nate Graham and Natalie Clarius, link 1 and link 2) Finally! I thought there was something wrong on my end. I also love how open KDE is and how almost any functionality in it can be automated.

geokon 3y ago
I liked that your could turn off the brightness entirely :( (Though in Kubuntu it doesn't) Not clear how you can even do that now. You can "sleep" the display but it'll turn back on when you hit any key
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You can always set brightness to zero via the command line using any monitor ddc control tool you can find.
  - geokon 3y ago
    ... but then I don't have a shortcut to turn it back on.. lol the convenience is that most laptops have dedicated brightness keys
    - tux3 3y ago
      I think it'd still turn back on if you press brightness up, as before :) And you can make a custom shortcut that runs a brightness to zero script as well, that should work!
- circuit10 3y ago
  Yes, being able to turn it off might be confusing for some people but it’s useful if you’re aware of it so there should be a setting
- mmh0000 3y ago
  Make a little script, bind it to a hotkey. For me, I use Windows+S $ cat ~/bin/monitor-off.sh #!/bin/bash sleep .5 xset dpms force off Same little trick for when I lock the screen, (Settings -> Notifications -> Screen Saver -> Configure Events): cat ~/bin/LOCKSCREEN-ACTIONS.sh #!/bin/bash ## Anything that is "slow" should be run in the background otherwise lock/unlock is slowed down #Mute audio on screen lock, only if not already muted: ( if [[ "$(amixer get Master | awk '/Front Left:/ {print $NF}')" = "[on]" ]]; then amixer -q set Master mute touch "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" fi ) & #Pause foobar2000 only if playing, and make a note. ( "${HOME}/bin/foobar2000-pauseonly.sh" && touch "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" ) & #Disable all mouses (to prevent movement waking monitor.) "${HOME}/bin/set-mice-status" disable #Force monitor to sleep. "${HOME}/bin/monitor-off.sh" And finally, I have the inverse of that, which is called on screen unlock, called automatically on screen unlock (Settings -> Notifications -> Screen Saver -> Configure Events): cat ~/bin/UNLOCKSCREEN-ACTIONS.sh #!/bin/bash #Unmute audio only if muted by lockscreen: ( if [ -f "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" ]; then amixer -q set Master unmute rm -f "${HOME}/.audiomutedbylockscreen" fi ) & #Enable all mouses. "${HOME}/bin/set-mice-status" enable & #Unpause foobar2000 only if paused by lockscreen. Remove note. ( if [ -f "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" ]; then "${HOME}/bin/foobar2000-playonly.sh" rm -f "${HOME}/.foopausedbylockscreen" fi ) &
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Oh cool I didn't know you could configure events. I made a script that just checks if kscreensaver is running but it always felt a bit duct tapeish. Thanks!
- pritambaral 3y ago
  > I liked that your could turn off the brightness entirely :( Looking at the change, it seems the dbus method[1] to set brightness explicitly to a value should continue to work. A script could be assigned to the lower brightness key that uses this DBus API. Alternatively, the same DBus API also provides a signal for whenever brightness changes, and an autostart script could be written to monitor for the value 1 and immediately set it to 0. 1: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/blob/master/daemon/actions/bundled/org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.Actions.BrightnessControl.xml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/blob/master/daemo...

cricalix 3y ago

The fractional resolution fixes - yes please. I run a 1440p and 2160p pair of displays, and on Wayland I cannot turn on fractional scaling for either of them due to the graphical artifacting. X - well, I can turn on fractional scaling, but it's global, not per display. KDE's "zoom the desktop with a keystroke" is also really useful. I first saw it on a Tech Tangents stream, where he was streaming an entire desktop/screen, and simply zoomed a segment of it to show something and then reset the zoom. All without touching OBS or the Extron.

adrm 3y ago
Right now I am running Fedora 38 with Gnome on Wayland, enabling experimental fractional scaling, and my two 4k screens are displaying wonderfully at 1.75x. The settings app allows you to do it per-screen, and it also works fine for me. Although I mostly have the same scaling in both displays since both are equal.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Right now I am running Fedora 38 with Gnome on Wayland, enabling experimental fractional scaling, and my two 4k screens are displaying wonderfully at 1.75x. Does that scaling work/look good across other apps, outside the Gnome/GTK4 ecosystem?
  - adrm 3y ago
    Just installed Kdenlive to test, and looks fine to me!
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Does it also scale by the assigned factor or does it stay at 100% scale?
      - adrm 3y ago
        The UI elements have a comparable size to the rest of the apps. I wasn't able to pick any glitches.

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

as someone who has been using kde neon exclusively for a few years now, i am very happy. I have not done any customizations beyond the wallpaper of the day and dark mode but still, there is a tonne of stuff that can be changed. I feel like the "welcome to kde" app should introduce users to the customizations they can do on the software, from themes to wallpapers to cursors to file open action and all the things. my point is, i recently gave a kde neon to a sibling. they did double click and it felt weird and they said "WTH is happening. i dont want it".. i was observing their action and i said "well you can change that behaviour. go to settings, touchpad, then double click......" what i am getting at is, there should be a way to educate users that most if not all behavour can be changed and where to expect those things to be. "point and shoot" became popular because of that reason only. point and shoot. kde is like point and shoot but can be changed. users think it is point and shoot like gnome but dont know it can be changed.

fernandotakai 3y ago
one thing i would totally recommend for kde is bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/ https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/ it's tiling for kde and it works REALLY well.
- dizhn 3y ago
  It started to degrade as development has stopped and the latest few point releases of plasma started to have issues with it enabled.

IshKebab 3y ago

> Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click to open them. What was it before? I haven't used KDE since the Plasma debacle but I don't remember it getting something this basic wrong...

shakow 3y ago
> getting something this basic wrong... Despite the obvious vitriol of your message, I'd precise for the posterity that when KDE was created, this was not such a surprising thing to do as e.g. old Apple OS did so, and it was a commonly used option on other OSs.
- howinteresting 3y ago
  I'm just happy KDE is changing old behaviors that are counterintuitive in the modern age. Now as for the macOS cmd-tab behavior...
msiyer 3y ago
there is nothing "basic" about this. something that seems pretty obvious to you may not be natural to someone else. i think the single-click navigation or opening of files was done to mimic how hyperlinks on the internet work. some people are wired that way. on the other hand, some people have a completely different brain configuration: they think that a single-click should select whereas a double-click should open a file. there are people who do not agree with both these options. maybe, they want everything to work via audio commands. how do we decide what the default behavior should be? the answer is: leave it to the user.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  > there is nothing "basic" about this It's how both major desktop OSes have worked for literally decades. It works very well. Why be different? Mimicking hyperlinks doesn't make sense because you never want to move hyperlinks around or rename them. There's rarely a reason to select a hyperlink.
- 3y ago

cardanome 3y ago

Single-click to open is one of the few hills I am totally planning on dying on. Why click double when you can just click once? As for selecting, just have files be selected on hover. Normally, I just right-click. Double click might have maybe made sense back in the days where clicking on things was expensive and you wanted to prevent miss-clicks but these days I don't see the point. The weird thing is, that is doesn't even take much time to get used to one way or the other. On systems with double-click, I just need a few minutes to get used to it again and vice versa. Since single-click is more ergonomic and more accessible (as some people have trouble double clicking), it should be the default. The whole double-click thing seems to be some sort of weird cargo cult to me but I am willing to hear counter points.

barnabee 3y ago
Open is rarely the action I want most often. I use search/typing in a launcher to open documents and apps, or I’m using a command line. Mostly organising things in directories or doing other admin or secondary tasks when I’m in a file explorer application. I also tend to use list mode on the smallest zoom, and multi- and group-select items a lot, which works terribly with hover select. Single click to select makes sense as selecting one or more files is the precursor to almost every operation. With single click to open my main use case would get much harder and I’d randomly end up opening stuff I don’t want to at least some of the time. No thanks.
aktenlage 3y ago
> As for selecting, just have files be selected on hover. That sounds horrible. How do you do multi-(de)selection then? I tried single-click for a while, but selecting gets awkward.
- electroly 3y ago
  While I think OP's idea isn't great, Windows seems to have an acceptable solution here: you can continue to allow drag-selection, and when clicking while holding down Ctrl/Shift you add to a selection rather than opening. The first click for the drag will be on the background and not on an icon, so it can still start a selection. This is how it works on Windows when you enable one-click.

forgotpwd16 3y ago

Find the "every poll of users I’m aware of has shown that they prefer double-click by a 2-1 or higher margin" mentioned in-article comments interesting, especially when contrasted with all other comments expressing a single-click preference.

TrianguloY 3y ago

A non written rule that most software follow is: if something changes when you hover over an item (usually meaning "select"), you only need one click to act on it. If nothing changes, you need to double click (because a single click will probably select). There are exceptions of course, but you'll realize that most software works like this, and those who don't are the ones users have more trouble adapting.

JellyBeanThief 3y ago

One of these days I'll get serious about trying to configure KDE to actually look usable. Every time I try it (about once every 1.5 years) I keep getting struck by how everything is the wrong size or is spaced incorrectly relative to everything else. Like the search field in the 4th screenshot in this article. Why are the magnifying glass and delete icons essentially flush with the edges of the field, while the search string is is an entire length of the icons away from the magnifying glass? It doesn't just look bad, it looks like a mistake. Even the title of the General pane is closer to the delete icon than the text the delete icon actually will delete. That's a particularly egregious example, but there's stuff all over the place in KDE that bugs me. In the 2nd screenshot the Start button is aligned with... nothing else at all. And it makes the part of my brain that processes design hierarchy cringe.

Tommstein 3y ago

The main thing I've learned from these comments is that apparently most people either don't have a right mouse button or don't know how to use it.