fuddlesworth/PlasmaZones v3.4.14 on GitHub

PlasmaZones v3.4.14

Added

Scrolling has shortcuts for cycling a column's tabs: switching tabs meant reaching for the focus keys that move up and down the stack, and those stop at the last tab and hop to the next monitor instead of coming back round to the first one. Next Tab in Column on Meta+Alt+Tab and Previous Tab in Column on Meta+Alt+Shift+Tab walk the focused column's tabs and wrap at either end, so a column of tabs cycles the way tabs do everywhere else. In a column that is not tabbed they walk the next and previous window down the stack, wrapping the same way. There are also nine Focus Tab shortcuts that go straight to a numbered tab. Those ship with no keys set, because both digit rows a Meta chord can reach already belong to the layout and zone slots. An action with no keys set never registers with the system, so it does not appear in the system shortcuts editor either. To bind one, set its ScrollFocusTab key under Shortcuts.Global over the settings D-Bus surface, which the daemon picks up straight away. The same key can be written into ~/.config/plasmazones/config.json by hand, and that is read when the daemon next starts. (#1071)
The wheel switches tabs while the pointer is over a tab indicator: the indicator answered clicks but not the wheel, so picking a tab from a run of them meant one click each. Scrolling over the indicator now steps through that column's tabs and wraps at either end, matching the new shortcuts. Holding a modifier still gives the wheel to whatever it was already doing, so the wheel chords that move the strip keep working over an indicator and an application's own Ctrl+wheel is never swallowed. (#1071)
What's New is a browsable history: the dialog rendered every release as one long scrolling list, so finding what changed in a particular version meant scrolling past everything after it. It is now a two-pane browser. A rail of version series sits on the left and a reading pane on the right shows either one release, a digest of everything since the version you last read grouped by New, Changed and Fixed, or every highlight matching what you searched for across the whole history. Searching or picking one of the kind chips now lands on the matches themselves, where before the filter only narrowed the release you already had open and the rail counted matches you had no way to reach. Every highlight in the history carries its kind as a badge, so the three kinds can be told apart at a glance and filtered on. (#1074)

Changed

Focus Window Top and Focus Window Bottom follow the same rules as the new tab shortcuts: they now say so and do nothing when a floating window has focus, instead of quietly moving the placed window that was focused before it. After you have scrolled the strip away from the focused column, they also bring the window they focus back into view rather than leaving it off-screen. Focusing up or down within a column with the ordinary direction keys does the same. (#1071)
The new shortcut and What's New text is translated: the strings added this release for cycling a column's tabs, for the Phosphor surface groups and for the whole What's New browser are translated in German, Georgian, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Swedish, so those languages have no English left showing in the settings or in the dialog. A full pass over the existing catalogs also corrected a group of surface labels that named the wrong settings card, along with terminology in each language that did not match the words its neighbouring pages already use. (#1075)

Fixed

Tab indicators no longer flicker on a screen at a fractional scale: on a display running at something other than a whole-number scale, the pill drawn over a tabbed column showed a hairline of the window underneath along one edge, and that line came and went as unrelated parts of the screen were repainted. The band was drawn to a grid worked out one way and told the compositor to repaint a grid worked out another, so the two disagreed by a pixel. The band is now rasterised for the device pixels it actually covers. Hovering a tab on such a screen also redrew and re-uploaded the whole band every time the pointer entered or left, because the shortcut that updates only the hovered pill required a whole-pixel offset that a fractional scale almost never gives. It now works at any scale. (#1072)
The OSD and the picker popups can be switched off again: turning off decorations for the OSD, the Layout Picker, the Zone Selector or the Shortcut Cheatsheet under Settings → Appearance made the toggle snap straight back on. Those four surfaces ship a decoration chain of their own, and that shipped chain was put back the moment the user's choice to clear it was read, so the toggle re-armed itself. Switching one off now sticks, switching it back on brings the shipped chain back, and a retune you made to the chain's settings before switching it off survives. The Popups card also claimed that surfaces below it had overrides shadowing it on a configuration nobody had edited, with a Clear action that could never clear them. Only surfaces you have actually edited count now. (#1073)

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S plasmazones  # or plasmazones-bin

Arch Linux (manual):

sudo pacman -U plasmazones-3.4.14-*-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Debian testing/unstable (apt repository):
Tracks KDE as it lands in Debian and rebuilds when KWin moves.

sudo curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:fuddlesworth/Debian_Unstable/Release.key -o /etc/apt/keyrings/plasmazones.asc
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/plasmazones.asc] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/fuddlesworth/Debian_Unstable/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plasmazones.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install plasmazones

On Debian testing, swap Debian_Unstable for Debian_Testing in both lines. Packages are built for x86_64 only.

Debian (manual .deb):
Built on Debian unstable. Prefer the apt repository above, which rebuilds when KWin moves.

sudo dpkg -i plasmazones_3.4.14-*_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f  # Install dependencies if needed

Fedora (COPR):

sudo dnf copr enable fuddlesworth/PlasmaZones
sudo dnf install plasmazones

Fedora (manual RPM):

# Fedora 44
sudo dnf install plasmazones-3.4.14-*.fc44.x86_64.rpm

openSUSE Tumbleweed (OBS):

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:fuddlesworth/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:fuddlesworth.repo
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install plasmazones

Universal Linux (AppDir):
For Fedora Atomic, Steam Deck, or non-root user installation:

tar xzf plasmazones-3.4.14-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd plasmazones-linux-x86_64
./install.sh

NixOS (flake):

# flake.nix inputs
plasmazones.url = "github:fuddlesworth/PlasmaZones";

# configuration.nix
programs.plasmazones.enable = true;

NixOS (without flakes):
Build this tag's source against your host's pkgs (no release asset needed):

# configuration.nix
environment.systemPackages = [
  (pkgs.callPackage
    "${builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/fuddlesworth/PlasmaZones/archive/v3.4.14.tar.gz"}/packaging/nix/package.nix"
    { version = "3.4.14"; })
];

Post-Installation

systemctl --user enable --now plasmazones.service
systemsettings kcm_plasmazones

fuddlesworth/PlasmaZones v3.4.14 PlasmaZones v3.4.14 on GitHub