In its monthly news roundup for March 2025, Linux Mint announced a series of features under development that are coming to future Mint releases (the last release was in January, which saw the launch of Mint 22.1 Xia).
To kick things off, file regular expressions (regex) search is making its way to Nemo, Mint's default file manager. Regular expressions are insanely powerful, with a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to them, you'd find yourself using them anywhere that supports it.
Future versions of Nemo will have a regex toggle beside the search box, allowing you to enable regex mode. You can check out the specific commit that makes this possible here. At the moment, Nemo only supports wildcards in the search box.
Other improvements in Nemo include expression validation for filename and content patterns, which allows the file manager to notify you when an expression is invalid.
Next up, Cinnamon in Wayland is getting improved support for keyboard layouts and input methods. The Linux Mint team hopes this feature is finished in time for the next Linux Mint release, as it's not ready yet. At the moment, there are issues to be resolved with input methods for Asian languages and more.
The Mint team also says that LMDE 7 will finally come with "full support" for OEM installations, which will allow Linux Mint to be pre-installed on computers that are sold to consumers. After purchasing a system with LMDE 7 installed, the user can fill in their details via a first-run wizard when they turn on the new computer.
Finally, Cinnamon JavaScript (CJS), Mint's JavaScript interpreter used in the Cinnamon desktop environment, will now be versioned according to the Mozilla SpiderMonkey engine it uses. Previously, CJS shared the same version number as the Cinnamon desktop environment and was only updated when Cinnamon itself was updated.
The new changes to how CJS versioning is handled should allow for more frequent updates, faster integration of JavaScript engine improvements, and support for multiple engine versions without waiting for a full Cinnamon release.
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