Summary
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Plasma 6.7 adds a long-press key popup to select accents, symbols, and alternate symbols.
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Long press supports fractions, em-dashes and other characters – not just accents.
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6.7 will also add sound-theme file switching and Global Menu will show menus in windows on other screens.
Whenever I need to put an accent on a letter, I go through all the different ways I know how to spell it. I try pressing Alt+Gr and pressing the letter, I try to manually mash up every Unicode combination I know, and if none of that works, I end up Googling it.
But what if you could just hold down a letter on the keyboard and choose what you want from the options instead? That’s exactly what’s being added to KDE Plasma 6.7.0 after someone coded a great new feature that brings a quality-of-life feature from mobile phones to Linux.
Press and hold the button you want to change and select from the selection
Every Friday the KDE team publishes a community review This Week in Plasma. It details everything that KDE’s contributors have been able to complete over the past week, along with an estimated time frame for when it will be released.
This week’s entry gives us a look at a really cool new feature. as described in feature programmer’s blog:
This feature allows users to long-press a key on the physical keyboard to access a drop-down menu of diacritics and symbols associated with that key and select one for input. This is a common feature on mobile keyboards, and I personally think it’s a huge improvement over using something like the compose key for the same purpose.
You can see it in action in the GIF above. Interestingly, this feature does not exist just to add emphasis. For example, if you hold down the number 1, you can choose between different fractions (½, ¼, etc.). And if you hold down the dash key, you can upgrade it with em-dash instead. So it’s not just for writing custom letters.
Surprisingly, that’s not all that’s showing up today on This Week in Plasma. The team also announced that changing sound themes using downloaded files is on the way, and the Global Menu widget will display menus for your active windows even if they’re not on the same screen. Of course, these features are optional, so you can always turn them off if you prefer to go without them.
