Common 

If we look at the incoming bug reports, a lot still seem to be located in our code folding implementation. The problem of the current code folding code, even after the GSoC rewrite of large parts, is that it is inter weaved with the syntax highlighting engine. During highlighting, we try to build up some tree containing all folding start/ends. To accommodate languages that have indentation based folding like Python, we started to fake such starts/ends which are normally tokens like { or }. As these tree can be unbalanced and contain overlapping regions, the implementation is quiet complex. Read More

I was a long time Vim holdout and often wondered to myself, “just why do those nutheads use vim?” until I googled and read the blog I just linked. After trying Vim out for a few days, I was completely hooked, but didn’t want to leave KDevelop with its awesome Intellisense/ code completion/ navigation features. Thankfully, Kate has a Vim mode, so I could get the best of both worlds :) Read More

Now the statistics of the kate.git are online for public viewing. They will be updated daily, located on: /stats/ Unfortunately, the statistics of the last years are not that “representative”, as the moves of Kate around in SVN and to Git biased the statistics, as I did a lot of the commits for syncing and moving and so on. Still it is amazing how MANY people did contribute during Kate’s history! (see Kate Authors) Read More

The project plugin in kate.git master has now the ability to call cppcheck. This is just hacked in at the moment and needs more love, but it works. Feel free to contribute integration of other code checkers, cppcheck is only the first, I hope ;)

Being vaguely aware that Python3 had some “interesting” differences compared to Python2, I had decided to not think about Python3 for now, but then one of our dear users piped up to say that even building it was broken! That seemed weird, so I started poking around only to find myself falling Alice-like into a Wonderland where strings were not always strings… Well, I’ve long been interested in i18n and l10n in all their forms, especially as they apply to Indic languages, so I was somewhat aware of the sorts of issues that Unicode can throw up. Luckily, as a KDE developer I’m used to depending on QString handle all the routine grunt work so it was a bit of a rude awakening to discover that, the C API for Python strings takes many forms: Read More

ID files and TAGS files are generated by GNU idutils and etags respectively. They are often used in coding projects to facilitate looking up, for example, the name of a function, and then visiting where it is defined, etc. In large projects, ID files can be hundres of MB in size, and TAGS files several times that. That looking up is obviously nice to have integrated into your favourite editor… When I started on getting ID file support into Kate, my need was to efficiently navigate source code indexed using an ID file a bit over 100 MB in size. The bad news is that I now have ID files over 300 MB in size, but the good news is even that is not a problem! Not only that, but by combining the ID file with dynamic invocation of etags, I can have all the TAGS functionality I care about without needing to pre-generate a 600 MB TAGS file as well. Read More

The Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna was a really productive time. Thanks to Joseph Wenninger for organizing it and the KDE e.V. for the additional funding! The Kate team was able to really wade through a lot of bugs & wishes and fix/invalidate a lot of them. After some more days of work, this really is visible in our nice bug chart ;) Read More

During our long bug hunting and fixing sprint I came along some nasty BiDi or Unicode related bugs. I and most others in the Kate team are not really able to fix such issues :( We lack both the knowledge of the underlying techniques and are not able to write/read any language that really uses complex unicode chars or BiDi text. Therefore: If you know Qt and you want to help out with fixing BiDi/Unicode related bugs, please provide patches for them in the KDE Bugzilla! Read More

One of the results of the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna is the new “MiniMap” that can be used instead of the vertical scrollbar. I came to the sprint with a black and white version of it for the symbols viewer, but got encouraged to integrate it to the core. The result, in cooperation with Sven Brauch from KDevelop, is a nice Mini-Map that can be enabled both in Kate and KDevelop. Read More

In some days our nice sprint will start, more information can be found on KDE Sprints. I am very happy that Joseph Wenninger organizes this event and the KDE e.V. aided with additional sponsorship! Sprints are a real important thing for all KDE projects and it is nice to see that thanks to the help of the community our e.V. is able to sponsor a lot of such events. I will head over to Vienna on Tuesday, lets see what happens during the week ;) Read More