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Kate/KDevelop/Skanlite Sprint Wrap-Up

Sunday, 2 February 2014 | Dominik Haumann


From 18th to 25th of January 2014, the Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona to work on these projects full time for a week. Full time usually implies about 14 hours per person a day (yes, besides food, we do nothing but developing). 11 developers working 14 hours a day for 7 days makes a total of 1078 hours. If we divide this by 8 hours, the typical amount of work hours in a day, this makes 134 man-days of work, or about 27 weeks of continued development time. While this calculation is a bit theoretical, it is still very valid to estimate the amount of work that is put into these projects during such a sprint, especially since usually developers have far less time for development in their spare time.

The efforts focus mostly on KDE Frameworks 5, so what is listed next is mostly relevant only for the KF5/Qt5 version of Kate etc. Going through the Kate and Skanlite commits from 18th to the 25th of January, we have (not listing all commits):

January, 18th (arrival day):

  • KTextEditor::Cursor and KTextEditor::Range are declared as Q_MOVABLE_TYPE, telling Qt containers that these primitive types can be mem-moved without copy constructor.
  • since KTextEditor and KatePart are now merged into a single list, the API was changed such that KTextEditor::Editor::instance() is a singleton. Therefore, KTextEditor::Document::editor() was dropped, as it is not needed anymore.
  • vi input mode: new sentence text object
  • merged code completion models
  • some API cleanups
  • removed ModeInterface, which was never implemented

January, 19th:

January, 20th:

January, 21th:

  • KWrite: use KTextEditor default status bar
  • Kate App: use KTextEditor default status bar
  • Status bar: finetuning
  • KTE::Application: add closeView/splitView, quit() methods
  • add API to disable default status bar
  • add Encoding and Mode to status bar
  • Status bar: port modified on disk notification
  • port close except like plugin
  • Open Header plugin: search list of open document before stating files
  • Skanlite: start porting KDialog to QDialog, fix help button, and more
  • Kate App: add built-in tab bar for switching documents in a LRU fashion
  • Kate config dialog: fix help button
  • template interface, use QHostInfo
  • port session chooser
  • Kate App: ViewManager cleanup
  • port the Build plugin to the new KTextEditor interfaces
  • word completion: remove beep()
  • Skanlite: fix about data handling, use QCommandLineParser
  • less *.moc includes
  • January, 22th:

  • vi input mode: expose more motions in visual mode
  • status bar: better sorting
  • tab bar: add tab also for documents without view
  • tab tracking: simplify, make tab switching work
  • tab bar tabs: track document name changes
  • status bar: fix sizing mess (part 1¸ part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)
  • work around QSpinBox pluralizable issues
  • revert quick open shortcut
  • fix viewChanged() signals
  • search & replace plugin: fix signals
  • remove all tab bar plugins due to the built-in one
  • sync syntax xml file changes from master
  • Skanlite: fix layout¸more porting, less K classes
  • status bar: no resize between status bar, goto line and internal command line, more, more¸more
  • add split view actions to view space navigation tab bar
  • no document duplicates in quick open
  • fix broken scroll bars when opening remove files
  • derive KateViewSpace from QWidget instead of QFrame
  • remove focus rect from view
  • Fix painting bug when scrolling while floating widgets are shown
  • allow empty view spaces
  • cleanup of ViewManager and ViewSpace logic (1, 2, 3,
  • extend ConfigInterface: icon-border-color, folding-marker-color, line-number-color, modification-markers
  • Skanlite: bug finding in framworksintegration module, fix focus
  • status bar: make spaces and tabs configurable
  • use popup for split actions in view space bar
  • show short cut in tool tip (cool one!)
  • remove KTE::View::informationMessage() in favour of the MessageInterface
  • January, 23th:

  • Kate, KWrite: show modification asterisk in title bar
  • view space tab bar: refactor, polish, fix sizing of tabs, more
  • status bar: polishing, cleanups
  • relicense file tree
  • Kate’s view manager: cleanup, more cleanup¸more, more
  • KWrite: reformat to kdelibs coding style
  • Kate: reformat to kdelibs coding style
  • set Document read-only on too long lines wrap
  • view space tab buttons: elide if too long text
  • view space tab bar: add action “Close other Views
  • avoid flicker in Kate
  • Kate: in fullscreen mode, show a button in the corner of the menu bar to escape the fullscreen mode
  • KTextEditor: add actions jump to bracket and select to bracket
  • API documentation: split docs
  • kate view space tab bar: implement correct document switching
  • tab bar: attempt for better sizing, again
  • API documentation: update porting guide
  • better order of elements in status bar¸not bold
  • Kate: turn SessionConfigWigdet into .ui-file
  • refactor Kate source code
  • attempt to make tab bar work as expected, another one
  • Python plugin updates
  • Kate View Space: allow to maximize a view space (cool!)
  • refactor Kate View Space a bit
  • small cleanup of view manager¸ again
  • performance: use QHash instead of QList for lookups
  • more cleanups with respect to view/document management, remove more API, and more removal¸ more
  • fix bug in bash.xml
  • loading message for file with too long lines: provide button to reload without limit
  • January, 24th:

    January, 25th (departure day):

    In the days after the sprint we did a lot more fine tuning and cleanups with respect to the changes we did during the sprint. So let’s have a look at Kate before the sprint:

    Kate on KF5

     

    Kate after the sprint:

    Kate after the Developer Sprint

    So Kate changed in several ways:

    • New status bar: The status bar is in the KTextEditor interfaces now. That implies that KDevelop, Kile, and all other applications using the KTextEditor framework will have the same status bar.
    • It is now possible to change the indent settings (tabs, spaces) through the status bar. The same holds for the encoding and the current highlighting.
    • Double click on “Line: …, Column: …” switches into goto-mode (Ctrl+G).
    • Double click on INSERT changes to OVERWRITE mode, if not in vi input mode.
    • New Tab Bar in each view space: This tab bar shows the documents you are working on in a least recently used (LRU) fashion. It only shows as many tabs as fit into the tab bar, since we want to avoid horizonal scrolling (it does not scale). If not all documents fit into the tab bar, just use the Documents tab on the left, or the quick open icon in the view space tab bar bar on the right to to launch quick open.
    • Since we now have a tab bar, we can now show the splitting actions at a more prominent place on the very right. New features include to hide inactive views, which equals maximizing the current view space.
    • Yes, no worries, the tab bar can be disabled.

    We’ll cover the workflow of the tab bar in a separate blog post.

    …oh, and we have much more in the pipe (not related to the sprint) :-)

    See also: