Common 

Today, I will travel back home from Akademy 2015.

I must say, it was really a nice KDE meeting and I had a lot of fun ;=)
The first day the KDE e.V. general assembly did take place, then two days of actually interesting talks (including the great announcement of Plasma Mobile). After some more days with interesting BoFs and hacking, Akademy is now ending for me.

I didn’t do that much work on Kate, I mostly did small bugfixes for the applications bundled with the KDE Applications releases regarding their HiDPI support, finally no Konsole that can’t redraw correctly on scrolling on a HiDPI screen with scaling activated!

A common problem for many applications contained in the KDE Applications releases are non-incremented version numbers. Often the maintainer forgets to update the version number of the application, like I did it for Kate since the first KF5 based release.

This means: On Bugzilla, I get bugreports that always tell me “Kate 5.0.0”, not very helpful.

KDE Frameworks solves this by automatic setting of the current framework release version in all framework CMakeLists.txt.

2021 Update: Kate's current mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker, a refreshed version of the mascot introduced in this post.

After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5  dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!

The next major step in Kate’s evolution is close: Kate based on KDE Frameworks 5.

Whereas it already works well enough for me (and others), it would be nice to clear out as many issues as possible before we have our first official KF 5 based release.

Our Bugzilla is full with smaller and larger Kate/KTextEditor (aka KatePart) issues, see:

• Our bugs in the KDE bugtracker
• Our wishes in the KDE bugtracker

Whereas Kate/KTextEditor has people working on it and continue to improve it over time, we don’t have enough people to keep track and care for all our reported bugs/wishs.

The yearly KDE conference Akademy just ended, so it’s time to look at what changed in the holy Kate in the Frameworks 5 land.

KTextEditor Framework

• silent reload of document: Switching a git branch, Kate always pops up a dialog asking whether to reload the document. With this patch, if the document is version controlled by git, the git hash of the file computed and then it’s checked whether the file exists in git. If so, the file is reloaded without asking you. This should be very handy for developers using git! Thanks to Sven Brauch for this idea!
• new highlighting unit testing infrastructure
• several new syntax highlighting files
• cursor down in the last line in the document moves the cursor to the end of the line, same for the cursor up behavior, after just 8 years a bugzilla wish becomes true ;)
• properly load/save the search & replace history
• fix kateversion tags in all our >200 highlighting files, thanks to Martin Walch
• as always: lots of improvements to the vi input mode

Kate Application

• use native dialogs on all platforms, including OS X, Windows
• split view: action to toggle splitter orientation
• the toolbar is by default turned off (see screenshot), resulting in a very cleaned up interface. You can turn it on in the Settings menu.
• new document switcher plugin (see screenshot) through Ctrl+Tab, providing quick access to the most recently used documents (similar to Alt+Tab in kwin), based on KDevelops code
• improvements to the tab bar
• revive, cleanup and improve the text snippet plugin by Sven Brauch
• projects plugin: autoload project even if no .kateproject is found (configurable to not clash with the auto-generated cmake .kateproject file), implemented by Michal Humpula
• the Plasma 5 applet to start a Kate session is back, thanks to the work of Josef Wenninger

A big thanks to the organizers of this year’s Akademy, and a big thanks to all our sponsors and supporting members. The location was amazing and the venue allowed us all to have a very productive week! Looking forward to next year! :-)

You like KDE software?

You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?

But you can’t help out yourself by coding, translating, bug finding, designing, documenting and whatever?

=> Feel free to fund our Randa Meetings 2014.

Perhaps it feels strange that a free/open source project wants money, but sprints & meetings are not for free, given you need to pay for the accommodations, travel, rooms for hacking, …

Just like some time ago, here are several links that might be of interest:

• C++11 compiler support overview
• Five new algorithms to C++11 that you should know about:  Interesting read about std::all_of, any_of, none_of, is_sorted, is_sorted_until, is_partitioned and some others. (And here some more generic numeric algorithms)
• noexcept – what for? An interesting read about C++11’s noexcept. Also interesting: Scott Meyers’ thoughts.
• An overview of C++14 language features: Mostly highlights constexpr and auto
• All about C++11 move semantics
• Number and string conversion in C++11
• What you should know about C++11
• Lock-free data structures (part 1, part 2)
• Use of assertions
• Static code analysis of Qt5
• Interpreter pattern vs. stack-based bytecode interpreter: very good introduction to bytecode interpreters
• Overview of design patterns
• Programming sucks: There is quite some truth in this, although this is probably less valid in open source projects.

Happy news arrived on the kwrite-devel mailing list with this post before Easter ;)

Kate has won the advanced text editor comparison in the Linux Voice magazine – Issue 2, yeah ;)

Nice to see that our work on Kate is awarded.

About Linux Voice: Seems to be some pretty new magazine about Linux & Open Source (Issue 2 says it all) and they promise to give 50% of their profit back to the Free Software community, developers and events. Hope that works out, it is a nice goal.

Since version 4.10 Kate comes with a simple project plugin, as introduced here .
The project plugin works by automatically reading a simple json file and providing the information found there to various parts and plugins in Kate.

“Opening” a project

Projects are opened automatically by Kate. Whenever a file is opened, Kate goes the directories from that file upwards until it finds a file named .kateproject , which defines the project. This is a simple json file, which is intended to be written manually by the user.

This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly

• one line about what you like on Kate, and
• one line what you want improved.

Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! :-)