Kate/KDevelop HackSprint – Up To Day 4

Woha, quite a few days flew by without me blogging about anything. Thankfully the others started to write so I don’t have to repeat it all ;-) Instead I’ll concentrate on stuff I did or learned.

GHNS for Snippets

Well, first I think an excuse is in oder: There is a GHNS button for Kate Snippets in 4.4.0 but it’s broken, neither me nor Joseph had time to acutally use and fix it… But anyways, I fixed it now for 4.4.1. For 4.5 we’ll also have an Upload Dialog.

I also added both now to KDevelop, you can now upload and download snippets from it. I added a few dump examples but will probably improve it steadily.

Kate Performance

On Saturday and Sunday I started to profile Kate highlighting for a large MySQL dump and managed to greatly improve the speed. Actually the funny thing is that I could improve RegExp based highlighting (you still should try to prevent using it, it will always be slower than simple char/string based highlighting). And the knowledge for this optimization I had from my time as an active contributor for GeSHi. I feel like it was ages ago, he funny :)

So if anybody has a big file that takes ages to load (but only if you use KDE 4.5 trunk or higher), tell me and give me the file. I might find some more ways to optimize different languages.

Other Stuff

Other than that I also managed to fix a few more bugs in Kate and KDevelop and had a good time with the other guys here in Berlin. Yesterday I showed some others how I spent quite a few nights: Partying in Berlin is nice :)

Oh and Bernhard showed me a little gem of his: Kate Standalone which you can use to build only KatePart from kdelibs trunk. This actually works very well (up until some new API from KDE trunk is used).