Developers 

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 ;)

According to our release schedule, KDE SC 4.10.0 will be available to the public in early February 2013. Following Kate in KDE 4.7, Kate in KDE 4.8 and Kate in KDE 4.9, this blog post highlights what’s new in Kate in KDE 4.10.

New Features

• Kate Part got a unified notification system. It’s used in several places already, for instance for remote file loading, data recovery and Search & Replace information.
• Kate Part can now be configured to show a minimap of the document instead of a scrollbar. The minimap shows text in a miniature view and is useful for fast text navigation in the document. While the feature itself is stable, it may be changed and should be considered experimental. Feedback is welcome on our mailing list.
• Kate Part got several predefined color schemes. Feel free to contact us with improvements.
• Kate Part shows the current line while scrolling.
• Kate got an integrated Quick Open feature (ctrl+alt+o) for fast file navigation.

News in the Plugins World

Improvements

Bug Fixes

Most of the following work was done during the yearly KDE conference and especially the joint Kate/KDevelop meeting this October in Vienna. A massive bug database cleanup was performed mainly by Christoph, so we closed several hundreds of bug reports, where ~280 are really fixed. So we are down to a total of 400 reports (only 70 of these 400 reports are bugs), where we initially had > 800 open issues. This also is reflected in the Kate bug charts:

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 ;)

In KDE >= 4.10, Kate Part’s scripting changed a bit. The changes are already documented in the Kate handbook, but we’ll quickly have a look into it now anyway.

Prior to KDE SC 4.10, scripts in Kate Part always had to contain the “type” in the scripting header, like indentation or command. This was changed to simply using different folders (system wide or in your $HOME kde folder) as follows:

In KDE 4.10, Kate Part got a new MessageInterface. The idea of this interface is to have a standardized way of showing notifications in a non-intrusive way, similar to how KMessageWidget in kdelibs works. Using the MessageInterface is extremly easy, for instance to show a quick notification, you write

KTextEditor::Message *message = new KTextEditor::Message(KTextEditor::Message::Positive,
                                                         "Code successfully reformated.");
document->postMessage(message);Read More
                
              

Loading huge files over the internet may take quite a long time. In KDE 4.10, Kate Part will show a passive message after 1 second that tells you the file is still being loaded, and, if wanted, the user can abort the loading process. It looks like this:

This also fixes bug #128273. Again, cookies go to Christoph ;)

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!

Currently we are at the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna. Christoph and me took the time to look a bit around in the net for Kate, and more or less accidently stumbled over quite a lot of extensions by our users. Here are some examples:

• script to jump to next/previous paragraph
• several really good highlighting files, e.g. for C++11
• several Kate plugins written in Python
• many more python plugins for Kate, even officially listed in the Python index
• there is more, I won’t list it all :)

Kate has just about 20 plugins written in C++. And, ironically, there are more plugins for Kate written in python. This is totally awesome, but still, the Kate developers didn’t even know about it ?¿? :-o