Kate in KDE 4.6

Some days ago KDE 4.6 was branched. So what will Kate in KDE 4.6 bring?

• The new tree view as “Documents” sidebar completely replaces the old file list. It supports the simple list mode as well as a pseudo-intelligent tree view to group files. The “Documents” tab is now implemented as plugin (always loaded), meaning that it brought a code cleanup as well. We hope you like it! :)
• Swap file support, meaning that you can recover all your unsaved data for local files on the next Kate startup.
• Ability to always load plugins.
• New SQL Query plugin. The day we blogged about it had the most visits in the entire kate-editor.org history. So it seems the the SQL plugin is a really nice addon for web developers! :)
• New GNU Debugger (GDB) Plugin!
• New Highlight Selected Text Plugin.
• Ability to add scripts to the menu and bind shortcuts.
• Kate got a new homepage on http://www.kate-editor.org featuring WordPress.
• Lots of bugs fixed since the KDE 4.5.0 release.
• SmartCursors and SmartRanges are gone, resulting in more stable and clean code. MovingCursors and MovingRanges replace the old classes and work reliable. For instance, KDevelop is already ported leading to less crashes.
• Christoph found the emails of the early days of Kate again. A funny read! :)
• Daily unit test runs. We have more and more unit tests, securing the correct behavior of e.g. search&replace, the text buffer, encoding detection or indenters.
• Kate development mostly moved to KDE’s git infrastructure, resulting in very easy build instructions.
• The default settings of a session are now stored in the katerc file again, rendering the default.katesession obsolete. This means you will have to configure your default session again (sorry!). On the other hand, this fixed quite some bugs with regard to the session handling.

Credit where credit is due!

There were lots of developers involved who helped to improve Kate. Thanks a lot to every one of you! Without your contribution, Kate would not be what it is :-) Keep it up!