KDE Plasma 6.7 will ship with an updated emoji selector

Another week has passed, and the KDE team has outlined the work completed during that time, including bug fixes for Plasma 6.6 and new features such as an updated emoji selector for 6.7.

David Uzondu Neowin · Jan 31, 2026 05:04 EST with 0 comments

We're about two weeks away from the stable release of Plasma 6.6, and the KDE team spent the last couple of days adding the finishing touches and squashing bugs in preparation for the release. Let's take a look at some of the work done.

Breeze-themed checkboxes in Plasma 6.6 now always have an opaque background, fixing an issue where their unchecked versions could sometimes be difficult to see when they sat on top of images. Keyboard focus in the Application Dashboard widget will no longer be stolen by selectable items that happen to be under your mouse pointer the moment the widget is opened.

On the bug-fixing side, Plasma 6.6 addresses a rare issue that could leave KWin without control of the mouse and keyboard right after you log in. The logout screen no longer fails to take focus if you have the focus-stealing level raised to "Medium" or higher, and manually de-focusing it no longer breaks your ability to re-focus it.

In addition to that, Plasma 6.6 resolves a bug in Discover when launched with Snap support that could prevent it from launching again after you had previously closed it. The KDE team also fixed a case where the Plasma Bluetooth pairing wizard would fail to pair devices.

Moving on to Plasma 6.7, the team has updated the Emoji Selector window, which now allows you to choose mixed skin tone groupings of emojis through a new, user-friendly pop-up dialog.

Before and After comparison — *Image via KDE*

You can now set a global keyboard shortcut to clear your notification history, offering a quick way to manage your past alerts. System Settings' subcategory back button received an overhaul, making it more of a traditional back button and eliminating one redundant page title, though the team acknowledges more work is needed in that area.

The Notifications page in System Settings now allows you to preview a notification sound even if the sound is currently disabled for that specific notification. Plasma's network settings now expose additional L2TP VPN options that were previously unavailable to users.

There is a fix slated for Plasma 6.7 for a "very nasty" KWin bug on Wayland that could cause the screen to go black under certain conditions during intensive Alt+Tab usage, with the only recovery being to kill the kwin_wayland process. The KDE team is considering backporting this important fix to Plasma 6.6 if it proves stable enough.