KDE Plasma 6.8 is due out in mid-October and it's coming with all sorts of new features, and one I'm particularly happy to see with autoscrolling.
Written up in a This Week in Plasma blog post from developer Nate Graham, they noted "the feature to scroll by holding down the middle mouse button and moving the pointer now has a new optional triggering mode: you can press the middle mouse button to enter and exit this scrolling mode, without having to hold it down. This makes it bit closer to the "Autoscroll" feature on Windows".
I love Autoscroll, I use it all the time in Firefox, so having it across the whole desktop will make my life a lot easier.
And another accessibility feature worked-in for Plasma 6.8 is a "dwell clicker" to automatically click when the pointer is moved and left alone for a while, with that time being configurable. More on that in a blog post from developer Sebastian Sauer. There's more accessibility improvements like screen readers now have the ability to ask KWin what window is under the pointer.
For Remote Desktop users, a nice addition too - a new mode that locks the remote computer's physical screens upon connection.
Plus plenty more to come for the full Plasma 6.8 release.
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seflasporin 7 Sep 2026
Last edited by seflasporin on 7 Sep 2026 at 8:05 am UTC
Liam Squires-Hand 7 Sep 2026
Quoting: seflasporinNate corrected that later. Plasma already has an auto-scroll feature, this just modifies it so you can press the button rather than having to hold it.Yes, as quoted :) - so it is now actually like proper auto-scroll.
Quoting: seflasporinPlasma already has an auto-scroll feature, this just modifies it so you can press the button rather than having to hold it. It's funny because Linus at LTT constantly complained about not having this in their Linux challenge. It's right there in the mouse settings.I didn't know about it either and now I need to test it. Like Liam, I use it constantly in Firefox.
Quoting: seflasporinPlasma already has an auto-scroll feature, this just modifies it so you can press the button rather than having to hold it. It's funny because Linus at LTT constantly complained about not having this in their Linux challenge. It's right there in the mouse settings.There is unfortunately a big asterisk here, not sure if this is what ltt was referring to. The implementation on linux is a bit different than on windows, where I would call it context-aware. In KDE it was implemented to instantly lock your mouse and try to scroll, regardless of which app and which field you have selected, and not even checking for a scrollable field. This means that with this feature enabled, it will lock my movement while I am playing a game, if I bind some action to the middle click. It has to evolve from this to something context aware like in windows.
Mountain Man 7 Sep 2026
Quoting: muizzDamnit, I don't use KDE anymore! Why did they have to do me like this? 😫What's stopping you from installing it?
Quoting: TarosWhat is the dwell clicker useful for?I imagine it’s for people who have difficulty clicking but can move the mouse, though I can’t imagine how they avoid clicking everything they don’t want all the time with this on.
Quoting: TarosWhat is the dwell clicker useful for?It's explained in the blog post that Liam links to. Now I'm waiting for a built-in autoclicker for those time-wasting games!
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