Most torrent clients today have ability to detect clipboard for magnet links. However, after copied an URL link, user has to manually open the downloading app and then click ‘Open URL’ (or ‘Add Torrent Link’) option to let it paste the link automatically.

Instead of using web browser pop-up to choose app to open an URL, KDE desktop has a built-in feature ‘Klipper Actions‘ that detects clipboard contents and automatically pops-up a menu allows to open link with desired app.

Picture 1: Click the pop-up option will automatically launch the app and open the link from clipboard

So just copy a magnet link. It opens the previous context menu (see the picture above) automatically, allows to click the menu option to launch your desired app and open the URL.

Setup the Klipper Actions for Magnet link in KDE:

1.) Firstly, find out the ‘Clipboard’ indicator in system tray on panel (or click the ‘triangle‘ icon). Then right-click on the icon and choose ‘Configure Clipboard‘.

Open Klipper settings

2.) When the settings dialog opens, go to ‘Actions‘ in left pane and click on ‘Add Actions‘ button.

Add a Klipper action

3.) In next dialog, do:

• input regular expression ^magnet:.*. It means any content started with ‘magnet:‘ (without quotes). See more about regular extension.
• Add description (optional).
• Click ‘Add Command’ and use qbittorrent %s or ktorrent %s. Use any torrent client as you prefer.
• Type description for command (will display as text in pop-up menu).

4.) After adding an action, the settings dialog will look like the screenshot below. Here I added two actions to handle magnet link and url ends with torrent with qBittorrent client.

Actions for magnet links and url ends with .torrent

After clicking Apply (OK), copy a magnet link and the menu should pop-up automatically, allows to single click launching qBittorrent and open the download.

And, there are keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Alt+X to enable/disable Klipper actions, and Ctrl+Alt+R to trigger the menu (Picture 1) manually.

After more than half a year of development, the qBitTorrent app released version 4.4.0 with many new features and various bug-fixes.

qBitTorrent 4.4.0 added Qt6 support. It offers better HiDPI compatibility for Windows 10+ and Linux using AppImage package. Though, it has known issue about text display on the progress bar. The Qt5 build is still the primary packages, though the next major release will probably drop Qt5 support.

The new release also supports BitTorrent v2 protocol and libtorrent 2.0.x, that use SHA-256 to provide a safer cryptographic hash function.

There are also some other new features, including announce to all trackers if IP changed, “Checking” filter in side pane, “Forced metadata downloading” state, “Skip hash check” option, double-click to show torrent options, temp folder per torrent/category, folder based UI themes, and more.

Other changes in qBitTorrent 4.4.0 include:

• Remember last viewed page in options.
• Add ‘Notification timeout’ option.
• Add context menu to toggle content tab columns.
• Add windows-clang support and update python installer URL for Windows.
• Prolong wait time for shutdown for qbittorrent-nox for Linux.
• Install vector program icon for Linux.
• Add detection for OpenBSD, Haiku in configure script
• Update Mac icons for Big Sur
• Stick Unread row to top in RSS feed list
• Setting to store/load fastresume/torrent files in an SQLite database
• More tool-tips, web UI updates, and bug-fixes.

How to Install qBitTorrent 4.4.0:

For Windows, MacOS, Linux AppImage, and source tarball, go to the official download page:

For Linux, the AppImage package is the only way to get the Qt6 build. Just grab it from the link above, make executable in file “Properties” dialog under ‘Permissions’ tab. Finally, click run the package to launch the torrent client.

qBitTorrent is also available as native .deb package for Ubuntu based system via its official Ubuntu PPA. The package will be available in next few days. However, Ubuntu 20.04 is no longer supported because its system Qt5 library does not meet the minimum requirement.

It’s also available to install as universal Flatpak package. Though it takes more disk space due to run-time libraries, the Flatpak was built with GUI lock support.

qBittorrent, free and open-source Qt5 based Bittorrent client, released version 4.3.5 a few days ago.

qBittorrent 4.3.5 is the last release in the 4.3.x series. And it’s going to drop support for Ubuntu 20.04 in the next release since it has an outdated Qt5 libraries.

Users who prefer qBittorrent can still get updates for Ubuntu 20.04 through the Flatpak package, since it’s a containerised package format bundle with most run-time libraries.

Changes in qBittorrent 4.3.5 include:

• Move cursor to the end when autofilling URL/hash in “Download from URLs” dialog
• Sort invalid QDateTime values after valid values
• Fix tabChangesFocus attribute in “Edit trackers” dialog
• Update DynDNS register url
• Handle “not enough disk space” error more graciously
• Correctly draw progress background with stylesheet
• WEBUI: Fix magnet url from the search facility
• WEBUI: Revise folder monitoring functions
• WEBUI: Fix magnet url from the browser
• WEBUI: Allow to specify file indexes in torrents/files API
• WINDOWS: NSIS: Allow more strings to translated
• WINDOWS: NSIS: Update Italian, German, Estonian, Russian, PortugueseBR translations.
• LINUX: Fix D-Bus Notification desktop-entry field
• MACOS: Don’t use executable name as CFBundleName value
• Lower Qt requirement to 5.11
• Clarify that the license is GPLv2+

How to Install qBittorrent 4.3.5 via PPA:

The official qBittorrent PPA has built the new release packages for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and Ubuntu 21.04.

1. To add the PPA, open terminal by either pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard or searching for “Terminal” from application menu. When it opens, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it prompts and hit Enter to continue.

2. If an old version was installed on your system, upgrade it via Software Updater,

or run following commands to install /upgrade qBittorrent in terminal:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install qbittorrent

Uninstall:

To remove qBittorrent PPA, either go to Software & Updates -> Other Software, or run command in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable

To remove the bittorrent client, either use your system package manager or run command:

sudo apt-get remove --autoremove qbittorrent