I was keeping myself on Plasma 5.x until recently. I got so accustomed to the Bismuth window tiling script for KWin that I couldn’t imagine myself updating to Plasma 6.x where Bismuth doesn’t work.

Unfortunately (?), one of the recent Debian updates broke Bismuth in Plasma 5.x as well, so I had nothing keeping me on the old version anymore. I’m now (again) running the development version of (most) KDE software.

Since the update, I managed to make the Qtile tiling window manager work with Plasma to some extent. But the integration between Qtile and Plasma I hacked was less than ideal, and I kept switching between KWin which worked perfectly, as KWin does, but without tiling, and my Frankenstein Qtile which didn’t work that well, but it had tiling.

Maybe I’ll write about it if I get back to hacking Qtile, but that might not happen any time soon because…

Krohnkite

Then I saw the news that the predecessor of Bismuth – the Krohnkite script has been ported to KWin 6 – see the announcement on reddit, github to get and review the code, and kde store for the package you can install.

Huge kudos to all who are involved in the rebirth, the script works as well as it did with KWin 5.

Window decoration

The only thing missing was the simple ‘just a line around the window’ window decoration that Bismuth had.

Now we have that as well, I’ve ported the original Bismuth window decoration to KWin 6 (nothing huge, just a few tiny changes to make it compile). The code, and the installation instructions are available on github.

Some time ago, Marco started a series of articles on SObjectizer. It is starting to become the source for all things SObjectizer – it is currently at post number 19 – quite an endeavour.

For those who haven’t met SObjectizer before, it is a framework for writing concurrent applications which supports the actor model, publish-subscribe…

EDIT: The series are available on Marco’s blog as well as on dev.to

People who have visited any of the larger C++ conferences surely know Rainer Grimm, know his talks, workshops and books.

Unfortunately, he has been diagnosed with ALS, a serious progressive nerve condition.

Since ALS research doesn’t get much attention or funding, Rainer started a fund raising campaign for funding ALS research with ALS-Ambulanz of the Charité and I Am ALS organization.

The recording of my keynote at this year’s Meeting C++ in Berlin has been published on Meeting C++ channel on YouTube:

The talk is about prog (or progressive) C++ and idioms that make C++ code provably safe.

The slides are available in the Traning and talks section.

Huge thanks to Jens for tirelessly organizing Meeting C++ for this many years (this was my tenth year presenting at Meeting C++, and I skipped a few).

Some time ago, I wrote a post about integrating Qt’s associative containers with the fancy new C++ features, range-based for loops with structured bindings.

That post inspired KDAB’s own Giuseppe D’Angelo to add the asKeyValueRange member function to both QHash and QMap. Now it’s possible to iterate over them with a simple range-based for loop, like so:

for (auto [key, value] : map.asKeyValueRange()) {
    // ...
}

The second part of my previous post demonstrates how we can iterate over Qt SQL results using a range-based for loop as if it were an ordinary collection.

This post covers what is needed to be able to traverse the SQL results in a much nicer and safer way like so:

for (auto [active, name, team] : QSqlResultTypedRange<bool, QString, QString>(query)) {
    qDebug() << "active(bool):" << active;
    qDebug() << "name(QString):" << name;
    qDebug() << "team(QString):" << team;
}