How to help with Kate development
If you want to help us developing Kate, KWrite or KatePart, you should join our mailing list. Contacting us at #kate on irc.kde.org is also a good idea, we are always happy to help you getting started.
How to Build Kate
Right now, you can build Kate very easily provided you use at least KDE 4.4. Click here for a quick howto. We are always happy about patches, just send them to our mailing list!
Areas of work
The main work area is the programming, but if you are not a programmer you can help in many other areas:
- Write and maintain documentation.
- Write and maintain syntax highlight files.
- Write and maintain scripts.
- Maintain bug reports.
- Provide us with useful feedback.
- Help us by helping KDE. As a part of KDE, Kate benefits from the KDE as a whole, apart from the excellent integration provided by KDE the help from the KDE translation team is invaluable.
Coding standards
We do not have very strict rules for code in the kate team, basically having this *kate variable line* in your source files will do:
// kate: space-indent on; indent-width: 2; mixed-indent off;
In addition, most of us have a newline before the opening brace of blocks:
void KateSomething::foo()
{
// I'll foo you
while ( bar )
{
baz();
}
}
Kate’s own C style indenter works nice for the code style we use in Kate code — surprise 
Documenting your code
We use Doxygen syntax to document code, and it’s nice to document everything, even private code, since other people than you might get to work on it or just try to understand it.
For comments inside of functions, C++ single-line comments are preferred over the
multi-line C comments.