Now that the next version of the KDE platform is branched, it’s time to have a look at all the changes in Kate in KDE 4.7.

• More than 150 wishes and issues have been resolved. A detailed list of the resolved  issues can be found in the KDE bug tracker.
• All Kate development is done in the KDE git infrastructure as submodule of kdebase. It is very straight forward to build Kate within a few minutes according to our excellent documentation.
• New Search Plugin with the ability to search in files on disk or opened files (will replace the Find in Files plugin in KDE 4.8).
• Plugin improvements: Build Plugin., GDB Plugin
• Kate’s tab bar plugins gained several new features.
• Swap files: If lost data is found, documents are marked as read-only.
• Further noteworthy changes: Improved printing, change of line ending triggers modified flag, fixed shortcut issues, fixed auto completion popup, and more.

Current State of Kate

• In KDE 4.6, we replaced the document list by the new File Tree. We got relatively few critical reports, meaning that the file tree seems to work pretty well for the majority.
• Kate has two GSoC projects at the moment: Rewrite of the code folding, and Improving Kate’s vi mode. The work done in both projects will be available in KDE 4.8, so we are already working on the next major KDE release.
• About 6 Kate developers are present at the annual KDE conference.
• A year ago, the Kate homepage was redesigned. Looking back the last year, we can say that this has been a success.

Just in case you missed it: you can read about Kate’s state 6 months ago here.