Maintainer Needed: Kate – External Tools Plugin
by Christoph Cullmann • August 9, 2011 • Common, Developers, KDE, Users • 22 Comments
The “External Tools” plugin is one of the oldest plugins of Kate. A big hug to Anders Lund for writing it years ago, a lot of people enjoyed using it.
It allows the user to specify own commands (aka snippets of shell programs) to be executed with the text of the current document or the current file.
Basic stuff you can do with it:
- Create you a little command that shows an Git/SVN/… diff of current file
- Sort the file with command line sort program (or more advanced scripts)
- Pipe the text of the document into your most loved perl script
Unfortunately there is no maintainer for it at the moment. Therefore it will be disabled for KDE 4.8, as a lot of bugs sneaked into it during the late 3.x and whole 4.x life-cycle. (Mostly because of bad porting done by me and others and no time to fixup any real bugs)
If you want to step up for maintainer ship, please contact me (cullmann@kde.org) or kwrite-devel@kde.org.
Thanks a lot in advance ;P
Btw., some of the bugs (now no longer valid but interesting for future maintainers):
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117946
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181528
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261210
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97569
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110485
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153963
That’s unfortunate.
With that plugin one could configure Kate to compile a file by just pressing a key, etc.
Please somebody pick this up. I do not want to resort to Emacs or Vim for simple things (i.e. 99% of the time).
Will External Tools Plugin be back in 4.8.1?
I guess I am not the only one that needs it badly!
I just upgraded to KDE 4.8.x… just to see that an essential feature of my single most used application (Kate) is gone. And why? Because there are some feature requests which were not fulfilled (in that list THERE IS ONLY ONE REAL BUG, AND THAT IS STUFF NOT BEING TRANSLATED).
Sorry, but this way of dealing with this issue simply sucks. Why couldn’t you just have let the code as it is? It is a really really simple plugin which does not need any serious maintanance, because it just fulfills an absolutely elementary task.
So what now? In order to be able to run Makefiles from Kate on keyboard shortcut I need to compile my own version of half of KDE? Or step up as maintainer, simply close all the bugs as “won’t fix” and leave the code as it is?
“External tools” was not only the oldest, but also the most helpful plugin. Removing it was really bad decision.
I use this every day. It is an essential part of my work flow.
Removing this because it has a few bugs was a terrible decision. As a plugin, it already could be disabled. Why didn’t you just set it to disabled by default and allow those of us who needed it to turn it on at our own risk.
Please revert this change by the next minor release.
Agreed. I used this tool on a daily basis. Whatever bugs it had certainly didn’t impact my workflow. The decision to remove it is a huge mistake!
Please, take this tool back. I usally use it every day too. I’m being pratically forced to change my favorite editor.
I have tried to get this back by reverting the commits
daea2a02e00007955cbcc892f0f5b06b0d8e6d9a
60ceb16f288b276a0b8b835e589244c4551d4403
798ae2fd2a2334515fe6d3592bbc3e71473840bb
However, after I rebuild kate, the plugin still does not appear in the plugin list.
Ok, I got it to work. You just need to revert the above commits (starting with the one at the bottom of the list) and compile and run kate.
My mistake was not following exactly the directions on this page http://kate-editor.org/get-it/
External tools will show up as before.
Sigh. This is the last straw for me. I’ve been trying to learn assembler on Linux using Jeff Duntemann’s book, and there were various things mentioned in it that had changed radically in the last two years (since it was written). I’ve just about managed to get workarounds for most of them, but Kate is the main tool used and there’s no workaround for this plugin’s disappearance.
The Linux environment is clearly too inconsistent and unreliable to make learning from a textbook viable. The ground just keeps shifting under your feet. I’m going back to Macs.
This plugin was the only reason that I have been using Kate for…
What can we do? Is there a body that would respond to all our tears?
Do you think there might be some way to hack the “Build” menu to do the same thing?
This is not a comprehensive solution for what external tools did. But, for instance, to execute the current python file in an interactive external terminal, I made the following the Build target:
konsole –hold -e /bin/sh -c “python -i %f”
It also works in Quick Compile
Initially I won’t do this, but, because I needed change my editor app and appears the problem will not be solved, I recomend Sublime Text 2. Here is a tip how to run external apps (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10465839/key-binding-how-to-run-a-external-script-external-command-program-in-sublime) on Sublime.
Well, I think we should keep pushing for this change to be reverted. Hopefully, a new maintainer will eventually appear and rewrite the plugin, however, I think they should have done that first and then swapped the old for the new instead of just removing the feature entirely.
I would be ok with reverting the changes myself and building kate from source (and posting a guide on how to do so), however as I posted above, I tried this and it didn’t seem to work.
Kate was the reason I moved to KDE in the first place, and the external tools that allowed me to implement a word count are essential for my work. I never found any bug, but then I only used them for the word count. If a built in word count is asking too much, surely not impossible if it can be done with a short script, then please give us back the external tools!
Meanwhile I will have to look elsewhere for a text editor.
add an external tool, with this script:
cd %directory
msg=$(wc %filename |awk ‘// {printf(“#%d lines\n#%d words\n#%d chars\n”, $1, $2, $3)}’)
kdialog -title “Word count” -msgbox “$msg”
there’s also lines and characters in there, but you can figure out to remove them yourself if necessary!
enjoy
May be the possibility to do a lot of such stuff with python in one of the next releases will help you, see:
http://kate-editor.org/2012/06/26/extending-kate-with-pytho/
I have been asked multiple times on how to execute a script from within Kate with a single button or keyboard shortcut. Supposedly, some people have a strong aversion against the terminal
. Anyway, I considered properly resurrecting the external tools, but don’t have enough time for now. As a workaround based on Ariel Balter’s idea of abusing the build plugin, I wrote a bash one-liner which executes scripts based on their shebang. If no shebang is present, an appropriate error message is shown. If someone else is interested in using this:
1. go to settings->configure kate->plugins and make sure the build plugin is enabled
2. close the settings and open the ‘build output’ tool view
3. in the target settings tab, create a new target with an appropriate name; paste
“”"
konsole --noclose --hide-menubar --hide-tabbar -e /bin/bash -c 'first=`head -n1 %f`; if [[ $(echo "$first" | grep "^#!") ]]; then ${first:2} %f; else echo "file does not have a proper shebang"; fi'“”"
as single line in the quick compile field.
4. in settings->configure shortcuts add a shortcut for quick compile
From then on, you can execute scripts from within Kate (tested in 3.10.2 and 3.11 from git) with a single shortcut. The downside is that the build output tool view opens whenever you launch a script.
Enjoy
I use the Quick Compile setting from Build Plugin for this, as described by Gerald de Crancy at the end, with this line for C projects (I use a makefile, but you could compile however you choose.):
“”"
f=’%f’; f=${f##*/}; case $f in *.c):;; *) echo “$f is not a C source!” >&2; exit 1;; esac; f=${f%.c}.o; rm -f “$f”; make V=1 “$f”
“”"
That is set to trigger off Ctrl-Shift-C, and -B does the standard ‘make’. For ‘make clean’ I just click on the menu.
You could check for a shebang if you wanted, in the * case, or just remove the extension unconditionally and use: “${f%.*}.o”, or switch on file extension to object.. You can even just call a standard wrapper written in any language you like.
Note that the Build Plugin is configured separately for each session and can have multiple targets; not so useful ime, since most of the time the session defines the focus, and you just want the keyboard shortcut doing the right thing. ‘Attach as Tab to..’ in KWin-4.9+ defines the workspace as two or more sessions if required. Thankfully, with this, the taskbar moving around is no longer an issue (in fact I now just let windows cover it instead for more vertical space.)
HTH,
steveL
Er the above was in response to David at the top. Not sure why it’s at the end. And I see my attempt to duplicate Gerald’s monospace effect failed miserably
Apologies for any confusion.