Kate in KDE 4.10
by Dominik • January 6, 2013 • Developers, Events, Users • 31 Comments
According to our release schedule, KDE SC 4.10.0 will be available to the public in early February 2013. Following Kate in KDE 4.7, Kate in KDE 4.8 and Kate in KDE 4.9, this blog post highlights what’s new in Kate in KDE 4.10.
New Features
- Kate Part got a unified notification system. It’s used in several places already, for instance for remote file loading, data recovery and Search & Replace information.
- Kate Part can now be configured to show a minimap of the document instead of a scrollbar. The minimap shows text in a miniature view and is useful for fast text navigation in the document. While the feature itself is stable, it may be changed and should be considered experimental. Feedback is welcome on our mailing list.
- Kate Part got several predefined color schemes. Feel free to contact us with improvements.
- Kate Part shows the current line while scrolling.
- Kate got an integrated Quick Open feature (ctrl+alt+o) for fast file navigation.
News in the Plugins World
- Kate’s Pate plugin now provides several new plugins by default, with Python 3 support.
- Kate gained a new and very powerful Project plugin with ctags code completion. It is tightly integrated with the Search & Replace plugin as well as the GDB Plugin and the Quick Open feature.
- Kate Search & Replace plugin gained find-as-you-type support.
Improvements
- Kate Part’s remove trailing spaces feature is improved.
- Kate Part’s scripting API gained several new features (e.g. zen coding script). The API now is more fine grained, e.g. you now need to “require(“cursor.js”);” in order to have the Cursor API.
- a lot of other little improvements, see our bug tracker for a full list.
Bug Fixes
Most of the following work was done during the yearly KDE conference and especially the joint Kate/KDevelop meeting this October in Vienna. A massive bug database cleanup was performed mainly by Christoph, so we closed several hundreds of bug reports, where ~280 are really fixed. So we are down to a total of 400 reports (only 70 of these 400 reports are bugs), where we initially had > 800 open issues. This also is reflected in the Kate bug charts:
Thanks to all contributors to make yet another release rock! 
And as always: We are happy for every contribution, so check out the Kate sources and send us patches! We hope you enjoy using Kate as much as we enjoy its development
I like the changes and bugfixes. Thanks a lot for all the hard work. I hope you had fun programming it, too.
Awesome, my favourite text editor just got even better! Hope there will be a KDE for Windows release again soon (last was in Feb 2012), since I have to work on Windows a lot these days.
thank you to all the Kate people ! Kate is my editor of choice since many years now
Very nice work, thanks to all the team for this !
If you ever have the time to include to include this Zen Coding plugin :
https://github.com/kursusHC/Zen-Coding-for-Kate
Good that you mention this: We have all a zen coding javascript now, see:
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/kate/repository/revisions/a1f58a262f9809ee3300009df1f60ff6af49f058
I’ll add this to the changelog above. So, as I understand, your script will not be needed anymore.
It’s possible to create a tmTheme to kateschema converter?
Our exported format is just some kind of ini-file. Therefore I guess that should be no big problem, if somebody has the time and energy for this
Anybody else has problem with missing selection highlight?
I have the same problem. The selection highlight is so helpful for me. Also Auto-bracket is changed (it deletes the selected word now instead to wrap it in brackets/quotes.
And finally – Python plugins are crashing my editor….
Is the plugin enabled in the Editor Plugins config dialog?
Nothing changed with respect to the “Highlight Selection” plugin, so it should just work?!
What distribution are you using?
For me, the plugin is not listed in the config dialog anymore. I’m on Kubuntu 12.10
Can you contact the kubuntu guys?
What language do you use? English or something else?
What happens, if you start kate with: LANG=C kate
Old bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275548
Starting kate with: LANG=C kate gives me the same result: the highlight selection plugin is not present.
Do you guys missing the plugin also on Kubuntu ? If so, I’ll try to see with the Kubuntu team.
Under Editor Component -> Extensions i have only four extensions: Auto Brace, Exporter, IconInserter and Insert File
It doesn’t exist under Application -> Plugins either
What about the quote/brackets “wrap” functionality ?
>What about the quote/brackets “wrap” functionality ?
It was removed in favor of the auto-brace plugin. If the auto-brace plugin does not provide what you need, please file a bug report on bugs.kde.org for the Kate component
@Anio, if you created bug report then please post number here, I’ll vote for it.
Found it:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314325
@Dominik, sorry, but that plugin is not comparable at all to that feature.
QtCreator finally gained such behavior and Kate just removed it.
Gentoo doesn’t have that Plugin either. On the Extensions menu, only the 4 plugins already mentioned are present.
Really hope you manage to get this feature back; its difficult to live without it
Hi ion, I have the same problem, when I select a word, no highlight… I hope this will be fixed asap.
Same here, I’m missing the selection highlight VERY much in KDE 4.10 !
I am also affected …
Same problem: the plugin is no longer listed. Gone … If I am not mistaken, was it not a standalone package called something like “kate-plugins” in KDE 4.9 ? There is no longer such a package in Kubuntu packaging of KDE 4.10 as far as I can tell …
REALLY MISSING that feature !! Hope it will be fixed soon.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314530
Should be fixed for KDE 4.10.1
Thank you for the link, the workaround described in the bug report works well, until it is fixed in 4.10.1.
Can you explain me how to apply this patch?
Thanks
Better just change 4.3 to 4.0 of the .desktop file as mentioned in the bug report. You need to run kbuildsycoca4 afterwards once.
THAT DID IT !!!
Many thanks Dominik for providing the workaround ! Much appreciated !
PLEASE ADD JAVA PLUGIN
KATE IS AMAZING
Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to turn the editor into a full-fledged IDE with Java support. For that, please use KDevelop.
Python strings became comments in Kate 4.10
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314773
Should be fixed. Just download the highlighting file through the download dialog in the config pages.
I am not sure if this is a bug. When I paste text tab-characters are replaced with spaces. I want indent set to use spaces, but I think it is incorrect behavior to remove tab-characters from pasted text.