Developers 

Currently, we use our own passive notification bar to show a recovery bar when a swap file was found: Since version 4.7 we have a class called KMessageWidget (api documentation). Using KMessageWidget, the notification could also look like this: Imo, the new one looks nicer, as it much better distinguishes the notification popup from the rest of the ui. However, it several drawbacks: Read More

Hi, just yesterday I got asked by one long time contributor, if he can at all join the KDE e.V. or if he needs to do something special for that. He thought it would be more an invitation only club. It’s not ;) Anybody who does contribute to KDE can join us. KDE e.V. definition from its homepage: “KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters.” Read More

With KDE SC 4.9 around the corner and according to tradition, it’s time to have a look at what’s new in Kate. **Improved Support for Custom Color Schemas ** improved “Colors” tab in the “Fonts & Colors” config page configurable colors: search & replace, code folding, indentation line, schema export and import honor background colors (bug #291868) and font “highlight selection” plugin and “search and replace” plugin now use search & replace colors from Kate’s color schema Line Modification System Read More

Like last summer I am mentoring a student working on Kate’s Vi mode this summer. This year’s student is Vegard Øye from Oslo, Norway. I’ll let him introduce himself: My name is Vegard Øye. I am a computer science student at the University of Oslo, Norway. I also have a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Sør-Trøndelag University College in Trondheim, where I programmed for integrated circuits. It was a lot of fun, so I decided to embark on a grade with an even larger emphasis on programming. Read More

One year more passed and the next Akademy will soon open its doors. Was never before in Tallinn or Estonia, will be an interesting visit. Hope to meet again a lot of old and new KDE people. Didn’t code a lot at all since last years meeting, too busy to finalize my phd thesis. Hope to get more time for Kate in the next months again ;) And at the meeting.

Since quite some time, Kate Part has build-in scripting support through JavaScript. Our plan is to make this API public, so other applications like Kile, Kate App and KDevelop can use it. However, we are currently unsure how to best implement it, so this is a rfc to get feedback. The bindings for a Kate Document are for instance located in part/script/katescriptdocument.h (header, implementation). As you can see, there are functions like Read More

Years ago, there was a blog on the planet with the title “How to crash (almost) every Qt/KDE Application and how to fix it“. In short, if you are showing a dialog, KWin prevents you from closing the application by clicking on the close button in the window decoration. However, through D-Bus, you can still quit the application. A solution was also provided: Use a guarded pointer to create the dialog.While this fixes the issue, it looks like fixing the blame, and not the real issue. Stricktly speaking, even the Qt documentation would be wrong then. Read More

Recently, there was a very good blog about The Importance of Mentoring. It was mentioned that the 3200 slocs of the gsoc projects could be cut down to 500 slocs, doing exactly the same thing. While hunting some crashes in the new code folding code from the last gsoc project, I obviously had a closer look on how things are implemented. The code folding uses a simple tree structure. Nodes can be added, removed or moved around. So I stumbled over the following code: Read More

Now, the categories in the “Colors” tab are painted like in System Settings (top: new, bottom: old): Thanks to Rafael Fernández López for relicensing the code of SystemSettings’ CategoryDrawer under LGPLv{2,3}.

This week, Kate Part received an update of the “Colors” tab in the settings dialog, available in KDE 4.9. The major features include configurable colors: search highlight, replace highlight and modified line colors – finally :-) possibility to always use colors from the KDE color scheme. the implementation works in a way that at some point, the host application (KDevelop, Kile, …) can put items into this list. Here are screenshots of the new (top) and the old (bottom) color tab: Read More