Kate | Get an Edge in Editing

Back in 2011, we decided to remove the External Tools plugin in Kate for the KDE 4.8 release, since it was unmaintained and we got more and more bugs that were not fixed. However, over the years, we got many requests (and complaints) to bring this plugin back to life, since it was very useful to start little helper scripts with just a shortcut, via the command line, or the menu. [Read More]

Since a few years Kate is working well on Windows. You can grab fresh installers since then from our download page. But the visibility of it was very low for Windows users. Already last year the plan was made to increase the visibility of KDE applications by getting them into the official Windows Store. Like always, Akademy is a great chance to get the last bits ironed out and the stuff done! [Read More]

The Opportunity During Akademy 2019 here in Milan, Dominik and me had time to sit together and discuss a bit what we shall do to evolve Kate :) Whereas Kate already works well as a general purpose editor, the competition in the text editor space got more intense in the last years. Beside the well established stuff like GNU Emacs & Vim, new editor projects got started that did set the bar higher on what users expect from a advanced GUI text editor. [Read More]

I worked yesterday again on the Perl script that creates the highlighting update site used by e.g. Qt Creator. I thought it would be perhaps a good idea to create some simple human readable overview with all existing highlighting definitions, too. The result is this auto-generated Syntax Highlightings page. Astonishing enough, at the moment the script counts 307 highlighting definitions. I wasn’t aware that we already crossed the 300 line. [Read More]

At the moment the Document Preview plugin that e.g. allows to preview Markdown or other documents layout-ed via embedding a matching KPart is no longer maintained. You can find more information about why the plugin got abandoned in this phabricator ticket. If you want to step up and keep that plugin alive and kicking, now is your chance! Even if you don’t want to maintain it, you can help out with taking care of existing bugs for this plugin. [Read More]

The default configuration for the Kate LSP client does now support more stuff than just C/C++ and Python out of the box. In addition to the recently added Rust support we now support Go and LaTeX/BibTeX, too. Configuration The default supported server are configured via some JSON settings file we embed in our plugin resources. Currently this looks like: { "servers": { "bibtex": { "use": "latex" }, "c": { "command": ["clangd", "-log=error", "--background-index"], "commandDebug": ["clangd", "-log=verbose", "--background-index"], "url": "https://clang. [Read More]

Initial support for the rls Rust LSP server has landed in kate.git master. The matching rls issue about this can be found here. Given I am no Rust expert, I can only verify that at least some operations seem to work for me if the Rust toolchain is setup correctly ;=) The current experience isn’t that nice as with clangd, for example I get no symbols outline here. What is possible with clangd can be seen in one of my previous posts, video included. [Read More]

Like my personal homepage cullmann.io, I ported the kate-editor.org website to the Hugo framework. The new website uses zero cookies (yes, no stupid cookie question) and no kind of analytic software. It should be self-contained, too. No external resources that will leak your data to e.g. Google are requested. But more important: unlike before, the website content will be fully hosted in a git repository on KDE infrastructure. The current intermediate location is on invent. [Read More]

After my series of LSP client posts, I got the question: What does this actually do? And why should I like this or help with it? For the basic question: What the heck is the Language Server Protocol (LSP), I think my first post can help. Or, for more details, just head over to the official what/why/… page. But easier than to describe why it is nice, I can just show the stuff in action. [Read More]