Kate Love: HighlightInterface, Autobrace

Well, I have to admit: I didn’t spent much time developing the PHP plugin for KDevelop these past weeks. Instead I hacked on Kate:

HighlightInterface

I added another Kate interface, this time to access some of the highlighting information:

what’s the Attribute for a given default style right now? Default styles are those known from syntax files, e.g. dsKeyword, dsFunction,…
what are used Attributes in a given line and what range do they occupy?
what modes do we embed? E.g. PHP embeds HTML, JavaScript, CSS, …
what mode is used at a given Cursor position?

This made it possible to port the “Export to HTML” action to a real plugin. If you come up with other output formats I might add them, I wondered about LaTeX support… might do this at some point.

This should also make it possible to use KatePart in other applications and than export the highlighting to a different format, e.g. a Flake shape for Koffice. Afaik this is actually planned by The_User - lets see if it works out!

The other stuff gives huge potential in various places, but I fear it won’t make it in KDE 4.4. But think of it:

simple code completion based on keyword databases, dependent on the mode at the position where completion was requested
same as above for snippets (actually this will make it to 4.4).
insert your ideas here :)

Auto-Brace plugin

Jakob Petsovits created this gem of a plugin some time ago, yet it lived in playground was probably only used by few. I imported it to kdelibs, hence it will be shipped with KDE 4.4. It supersedes the limited “auto-brackets” feature of Kate and only adds braces when a newline gets added. I find this fits my personal coding habits much better than blindly copying brackets when they get added.

And I don’t just copied to kdelibs, I also added a few features:

automatically add a semicolon after the closing brace when we start a new struct/class in C++ mode
check for auto-brackets feature and disable it automatically

Also did this:

don’t add brace when current line contains namespace and a following line starts with class or struct (C++ mode only)
don’t add brace when current line contains class, interface or struct and the following line contains private, public, protected. C++ code is also checked for signals, Q_SIGNALS", other modes are checked forfunction`.

This should fix the bug for code like (note the indendation levels):


  
    
      namespace foo { // insert line here
    
  
  
    
      class bar;
    
  
  
    
      }
    
  
  
    
      class asdf { // insert line here
    
  
  
    
      private:
    
  
  
    
      ...
    
  
  
    
      };