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Articles by Kai Uwe
Red Diff is Good Diff
A patch-set that removes more code than it adds is always much appreciated. Code that doesn’t exist cannot have bugs after all! KWin, our fantastic Wayland compositor and window manager, like many others, has an Alt+Tab switcher (“tabbox”) for quickly cycling between windows. Of course having been created by KDE, there’s plenty of options for how it should behave and what it should look like.
Reworking KSSHAskPass
KDE has a little utility called ksshaskpass that is invoked by SSH to prompt the user for credentials. It can then store them in KDE Wallet so you don’t have to type them again next time. The other day I had to set up an elaborate SSH configuration with jump hosts and what not and found that it actually couldn’t handle some of the prompts I encountered along the way. A regular password prompt, nothing too fancy.
Computer Science > Information Retrieval
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Computer Science > Information Retrieval
As datasets and the dimensionality of feature vectors continue to grow, Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) in large multimedia databases becomes increasingly relevant. Graph-based approaches have demonstrated to offer the best trade-off between retrieval precision and search time.
Computer Science > Information Retrieval
The annual SISAP Indexing Challenge benchmarks Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) algorithms under rigorous constraints. This paper presents our submissions for the 2026 edition, addressing both $k$-Nearest Neighbor Graph (kNNG) construction on 1024-dimensional BGE-M3 embeddings (Task 1) and Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) on unnormalized Llama-3.2-8B features (Task 2).
Attention to Detail
A couple of months ago I improved some of our dialogs and this time I worked on some more. Did you know that you can just paste the clipboard’s content into the Dolphin file manager or on the desktop to create a new file from it? Just paste your clipboard’s content to create a new file Tobias Fella added a proper “platform message dialog” for Qt to use. This replaces the hideous Qt Quick message dialogs you could see in some places.
Qt No Contextless Connect
As many long running projects, Qt too over the years has accumulated some APIs that in hindsight are deemed unsafe or sub-optimal. For example, Qt by default implicitly converts const char* to QString. While that usually only incurs a runtime overhead, maybe encoding problems, but also admittedly less cluttered code, there’s other APIs that can backfire in more subtle ways. One such API is doing a “context-less connect”.
Tighter KDE Connect Integration
In my opinion, KDE Connect is one of the finest pieces of software KDE has ever produced. It lets you easily pair your devices and makes them work together. Copy some text on your computer, paste it on your phone. A call comes in and the video you’re watching in your browser pauses. How cool is that? For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on even tighter integration between KDE Connect and the Plasma desktop.
Nifty Dialogs - Kai Uwe's Blog
As explained in one of my previous blog posts where I revamped the unresponsive window dialog, KWin isn’t really designed to show regular desktop windows of its own. It instead relies on helper programs to display messages. In case of the “no border” hint, it just launched kdialog, a small utility for displaying various message boxes from shell scripts.
Holiday Hacking 2025
Like every year I took a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent some quality time with the family. Time just flies and it feels like the year had only just begun. I have also taken the time to revisit some of my work-in-progress merge requests and tried to push them over the finish line. Please talk now or forever hold your peace. More than five years ago, at the peak of the pandemic, I wrote a patch to add a “Push to talk” feature to Plasma’s volume keys handler.
30 Reasons I ❤️ KDE Plasma
KDE’s 30th birthday is coming up next year. For this year’s holiday season I therefore decided to compile a list of 30 reasons why I love KDE Plasma. It makes me so much more productive and work a lot more fun. While some of the items listed below aren’t unique to Plasma, it’s the combination of all of those things that truly makes it the best desktop environment out there. Tell me, what are your top reasons?
Little KWin Helpers
KWin, our fantastic and flexible window manager and Wayland compositor, can not just drive your session but also run in windowed mode for development purposes: $ dbus-run-session kwin_wayland --exit-with-session kwrite Et voila, a windowed KWin appears, running KWrite. The separate DBus session is important so it doesn’t mess with your running session, notably trying to take over your global shortcuts.
KSplash BGRT - Kai Uwe's Blog
A little side project I just published is a KSplash theme (the loading screen while logging into a Plasma session) that uses BGRT, the ACPI Boot Graphics Record Table. Basically: a KSplash theme that displays the vendor logo that also your UEFI shows during the boot process. I’ve always been looking for a seamless startup experience, back then playing around with various Plymouth themes, login manager themes, KWin effects, and so on.
Plasma Browser Integration in 6.x
It has been a little quiet around my pet project Plasma Browser Integration. On one hand because I’ve been busy with life but also because browser extension APIs haven’t really gained much new functionality. Nevertheless, for Plasma’s October release I finally found the time to take care of some long-standing feature requests and/or bug reports. Plasma Browser Integration consists of two pieces: the “native” host and the browser extension.
Akademy 2025 - Kai Uwe's Blog
I’ve just returned from this year’s Akademy in Berlin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the entire conference that is still ongoing but the weekend of talks and welcome and social events have been magnificent. I’ve also meet a couple of fellow KDE hackers that I haven’t seen in a decade. Friday afternoon I arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof on an ICE that was, I kid you not, punctual to the minute. That of course meant there wasn’t much interesting to collect for KDE Itinerary.
Akademy Time is Itinerary Time
Every year the KDE Community conducts a large-scale field-test of KDE Itinerary, their fantastic travel companion app, disguised as annual community conference. This year’s Akademy takes place in the capital of Germany, Berlin. I have decided to try and exclusively use KDE Itinerary (full trip planner app) and KTrip (focused on public transport) for all my travel needs from and to the venue as well as its accompanying events.
The other day I finally replaced my trusty Thinkpad T480s I bought 6½ years ago. Overall, I was still pretty happy with it and even gave it a little refresh early last year (RAM upgrade, bigger SSD, new keyboard) but the CPU was really starting to show its age when compiling. I’m almost as picky as Nate when it comes to laptops but the P14s Gen 5 AMD (what a mouthful) checked more boxes than most laptops I looked at in recent years.
On Window Activation
You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol. In essence, an application cannot take focus, it can only receive focus.
Skip navigation Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/119395 Title: Land use and mineral type determine stability of newly formed mineral-associated organic matter Type: Article Language: English URI: https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/121353 Open Access: Open access publication License: (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Journal Title: Communications earth & environment Publisher: Springer Nature Publisher Place: London...
PI(M)P Your Clock
You may have read about my new-found fondness for Plasma’s Clock app. Following the development of a “Picture in Picture” protocol for Wayland, I remembered how I once saw someone put up a little timer window during a lunch break while screen-sharing a presentation. I figured, I wanted that, too! A key difference between X11 and Wayland is that Wayland is descriptive, not prescriptive.
KIO Goodies - Kai Uwe's Blog
KIO (KDE Input/Output) is what allows KDE applications to transparently and asynchronously access files, both local and over the network. It also provides many of the user interfaces for manipulating files, such as the Places panel, Open/Save dialog, folder properties, new file menu, and many more. The other day I went through some of its dialogs and gave them a slight overhaul. When clicking an executable file, it confirms whether to really run it.
Be Free to Have Multiple Clocks
Back in ye olde days there was a running gag that Plasma was all about clocks. With its then-new widget system you could add as many as you wanted, after all. Plasma included not only an analog and a digital clock, there was a binary clock, too, and my all-time favorite fuzzy clock that shows the current time in a colloquial textual way, such as “Quarter to seven”.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
[Submitted on 17 Mar 2025 ( v1 ), last revised 26 Jun 2026 (this version, v3)] Title:Permutation Learning with Only N Parameters: From SoftSort to Self-Organizing Gaussians View a PDF of the paper titled Permutation Learning with Only N Parameters: From SoftSort to Self-Organizing Gaussians, by Kai Uwe Barthel and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Sorting and permutation learning are key concepts in optimization and machine learning, especially when organizing...
Pondering Qt - Kai Uwe's Blog
Qt Contributor’s Summit 2025 is taking place in Munich in May. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it this year, so let’s talk about some of my recent contributions to our favorite cross-platform UI toolkit. A couple of years ago I added a context menu to the line number bar in KWrite and Kate. Rather than having to go to the menu to toggle automatic line breaks or bookmarks, those options were now accessible from the context menu.
Mnemonics, Mnemonics Everywhere
The M is silent. In computing this stands for the underlined letters in menus that can be triggered using an Alt+Letter key combination, one that you can remember and apply later to navigate around more quickly. Qt and other toolkits typically use an ampersand to denote a mnemonic when assigning a menu entry. For instance, “&Shutdown” will be displayed as “Shutdown” and trigger on Alt+S whereas “Slee&p” will be “Sleep” and trigger on Alt+P.
Hardware Shenanigans
(originally titled “On Dead Trees”) There’s features that you know are really important to some of our users but you frankly don’t really care for them much yourself. Printing is one such example. Recently, I actually had to print lots of paperwork, so I had a reason to fix some of my more pressing issues with our Print Manager.
Little Wayland Things
While I do have a Qt git build on my machine that I use for development, I usually only test individual applications and functionality but hardly ever run my full Plasma session on it. This means that for day-to-day use I typically only get to enjoy new Qt features once they have actually been released. One feature I talked about in the very last issue of “On the road to Plasma 6” is a nice API for XDG Foreign.
Plasma Browser Integration 2.0
I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 2.0 on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons page. This release updates the extension to Manifest Version 3 which will be required by Chrome soon. The major version bump reflects the amount of work it has taken to achieve this port. Plasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop.
CLPB disaggregase dysfunction impacts the functional integrity of the proteolytic SPY complex
CLPB is a mitochondrial intermembrane space AAA+ domain–containing disaggregase. CLPB mutations are associated with 3-methylglutaconic aciduria and neutropenia; however, the molecular mechanism underscoring disease and the contribution of CLPB substrates to disease pathology remains unknown. Interactions between CLPB and mitochondrial quality control (QC) factors, including PARL and OPA1, have been reported, hinting at dysregulation of organelle QC in disease.
Freezing in Style
One of the the less apparent omissions in Plasma’s Wayland session compared to X was the lack of a prompt for terminating an unresponsive app. Of course, you should never see one because any decent app will just crash and quit rather than get stuck. Nevertheless, over the course of three evenings I spent way too much time making the “KWin Killer Helper” work on Wayland and while at it revamped its user interface entirely.
[2307.10479] Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with a Dynamic Exploration Graph using Continuous Refinement
arXiv:2307.10479 (cs) Download a PDF of the paper titled Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with a Dynamic Exploration Graph using Continuous Refinement, by Nico Hezel and 3 other authors Download PDF Submission history From: Nico Hezel [ view email] [v1] Wed, 19 Jul 2023 22:20:06 UTC (1,281 KB) Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer () Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code,...
Performance Musings
Sometimes while using my computer I notice random slowness when launching a certain application or some feature that just doesn’t run very well. That’s always reason enough for me to take a deeper look. My tool of choice for analyzing performance issues is Hotspot, KDAB’s excellent perf visualizer. It comes with an easy to use GUI for browsing the results collected by it. Particularly its flame graph lets you quickly detect, well, hotspots during execution.
Powerbanka pro notebook
12 » Poradna » Notebooky Kai Uwe | 12. 9. 2022 17:47 | Ahoj, doporučíte mi prosím powerbanku pro můj notebook Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro? Mohu notebook powerbankou nabíjet pomocí USB-A nebo USB-C? V tomto se vůbec neorientuji.Budu rád za každou radu. Díky moc. Odpovědi na otázku Jojodák | 12. 09. 2022 19:10 | Samozřejmě jenom USB-Caby to mělo kapku smysl tak něco takovéhohttps://www.alza.cz/alzapower-metal-40000mah-... Souhlasím | Nesouhlasím | Odpovědět milda801 | 13. 09.
Reunited after a decade
It’s been more than ten years since Dolphin, KDE’s versatile file manager, introduced its own custom QGraphicsView-based view engine. With that came more detailed view modes with grouping support, animated transitions, and a new places panel with sections. Unfortunately, it is all based on a now long-abandoned “Itemviews NG” project, and is inherently incompatible with Qt’s traditional model-view code used elsewhere in KDE. Looks virtually the same, doesn’t it?
PSA: Plasma Browser Integration Currently Unavailable
A fix is being worked on, but might take a bit, sorry about that.
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