KDE Plasma is getting kwindowprop, a new xprop-like tool for inspecting windows

The KDE team is back from Akademy 2025 and is now back to work on KDE, bringing the release of Plasma 6.5 Beta 1, as well as several bug fixes and improvements from Plasma 6.4.6 and 6.5. The team is encouraging users to test the beta release before the final version drops in about a month.

In Plasma 6.5, there's now a tool that works similarly to xprop, called kwindowprop. If you're not aware, xprop is a command-line tool that displays window properties for the old X11 windowing system. You run the command, and it lets you inspect a window's information when you click on it.

The global search in KRunner will also no longer get stuck on comma-based group separators when you perform calculations, so asking it to compute "5,200 * 12,873" works just fine now.

Image via KDE

Other things that were introduced include support for text insertion point tracking within the Zoom effect on Wayland.

The dev team says that window activation is now better on Wayland, making the experience of switching between applications a bit more reliable. This has been a long-standing annoyance for many, so any improvement is good news. Another nice quality of life change is that now, when you right-click on many System Tray widgets, you can access their actions directly from a context menu.

Moving on to the bug fixes, Plasma 6.4.6, scheduled for release in November, addresses problems with printer ink levels being shown when not needed and fixes an issue preventing the Breeze GTK style from being activated by default.

As for Plasma 6.5, the team has been squashing a lot of bugs. For instance, drag-and-drop now functions correctly with a stylus on Wayland, and input methods for older X11 applications should work properly again.

The team also fixed a problem that could cause some Flatpak apps to show the wrong icons on the permissions page in System Settings. Another issue that was addressed was one where, when you click on a disabled zoom button on the Night Color map, it would move the location marker.

You can learn more from the KDE blog.