Nate Graham is one of the main developers of KDE and was recently elected to the KDE eV Board of Directors. As in the past, he recently shared some KDE-related function development progress, so that everyone can learn about KDE’s recent development tasks and future road planning in advance.

In the KDE development work released this time, there is a function that deserves special attention-that is, the preliminary work of KWin’s built-in advanced window split-screen layout has been completed, and users will be allowed to create custom tiled layouts in the future.

KWin is a window manager for the X Window System and a Wayland compositor. It was released as part of KDE Plasma 5 and is the system’s default window manager. KWin can also be used alone or with other desktop environments.

KWin can be configured by scripts based on ECMAScript (such as QML, QtScript), which can allow users to fully control the window. By adjusting the preferences of the window, it can bring users a better experience. Among the features included are:

• Supports launching applications with a specific size and position
• Customize the position of the title bar buttons
• When there are multiple monitors/desktops, it supports opening specific applications directly on different desktops
• Window decorations, fonts, etc. can be adjusted according to the screen size
• …

It can also be seen from the above figure that currently KWin has preset multiple tile layouts, and users can quickly adjust the layout of multiple windows to improve work efficiency.

In addition to the preset schemes, KWin also provides tiling configuration options, users can modify the horizontal tiling to vertical tiling according to personal preference (it feels more suitable to use the display vertically). Of course, there is no problem in manually adjusting the size of multiple adjacent windows by directly dragging the gap between them.

This feature is still in its infancy, and Nate Graham hopes that it will improve over time, and the new API added to it will also enable third-party tiling scripts that want to turn KWin into a tiling window manager benefit. This feature is expected to be released in Plasma 5.27.

In addition to having an advanced window tiling system built into KWin, KDE improvements include:

• Support for browsing Apple iOS devices using the native afc:// protocol in Dolphin file manager and other file management tools.

• Konsole will adopt KHamburgerMenu

• Konsole’s tab bar now defaults to the top of the window instead of the bottom
• Support for Global Shortcuts in Plasma 5.27 allows Flatpak and other sandboxed applications to use the portal system, providing a standardized user interface for setting/editing global shortcuts.
• KDE Plasma Mobile Gear, which focuses on mobile KDE applications, will now move to the normal “KDE Gear” release schedule to unify them.