Developers 

After a long time of constant distraction by my daily work, I finally found again a bit time to take care of KTextEditor/Kate/… issues.

One thing that really started to be an itch I wanted to scratch is some rendering fault that occur with ‘special’ font sizes.

Given I wanted to do again a bit work on the macOS port, I was really annoyed that on my screen the only application with text rendering issues was “my” one :/

By default, the terminal looks as follows on my Linux distribution:

However, if you are working a lot on the terminal, there are a lot of scripts and tricks available in the net that improve the information displayed in the terminal in many ways. For instance, since many many years, I have the following at the end of my ~/.bashrc:

The KTextEditor Framework uses the syntax highlighting files provided by the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework since the  KDE Frameworks release 5.28.

The KSyntaxHighlighting Framework implements Kate’s highlighting system and meanwhile is used in quite some applications (e.g. LabPlot, KDE PIM). What is quite nice is that the KSyntaxHighlighting framework is nicely unit tested. And while we do not have tests for all highlighting files, we still provide some quality assurance through a compile time checker.

Recently, the KSyntaxHighlighting framework was added to the KDE Frameworks 5.29 release. And starting with KDE Frameworks 5.29, KTextEditor depends on KSyntaxHighlighting. This also means that KTextEditor now queries KSyntaxHighlighting for available xml highlighting files. As such, the location for syntax highlighting files changed from $HOME/.local/share/katepart5/syntax to

$HOME/.local/share/org.kde.syntax-highlighting/syntax

So if you want to add your own syntax highlighting files to Kate/KDevelop, then you have to use the new location.

Hi,

in the recent months, I didn’t find much time to spend on Kate/KTextEditor development. But at least I was now able to spend a bit more time on OpenSource & Qt things even during work time in our company. Normally I am stuck there with low level binary or source analysis work.

For our products, we were in the need of some online help. As our documentation is delivered as PDFs generated by the tools of the TeX Live distro, a natural idea was to use some PDF viewer and integrate it more tightly in our software than just “open the manual at page 1”.

New framework: syntax-highlighting
Syntax highlighting engine for Kate syntax definitions

This is a stand-alone implementation of the Kate syntax highlighting engine. It’s meant as a building block for text editors as well as for simple highlighted text rendering (e.g. as HTML), supporting both integration with a custom editor as well as a ready-to-use QSyntaxHighlighter sub-class. Read More

In the past, KTextEditor notified the user about externally modified files with a modal dialog. Many users were annoyed by this behavior.

Starting with KDE Frameworks 5.27, KTextEditor will show an embedded widget for external changes, see:

Dominik and me got the Akademy 2016 Award for our work on Kate and KTextEditor.

I want to pass that on to all other contributors of both the application and the framework: You all rock and people seem to appreciate our work!

Lets keep on improving our stuff and providing people with a very usable editor and editor component for various use cases.