Developers 

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.

The yearly KDE conference Akademy is currently being held with lots of interesting talks and workshops. One big thing that was announced yesterday is Plasma Mobile, a free mobile platform.

The presentation of Plasma Mobile was quite impressive: A video of using Plasma Mobile on a Nexus 5 showed a nice  visual design, smooth transitions and quite some usable functionality already. This impression was confirmed later when I was playing around with Plasma Mobile on the Nexus 5 myself.

In the last months, I didn’t get much time to work on Kate nor KTextEditor. Beside some small bugfixes and cleanups I got nothing commited :/

Guess one of the main issues is, I don’t use the KF5 based version of Kate that much ATM. At home, it is the only editor I use, but I have not much time to hack at home anyway.

Therefore today I installed the same setup on my work machine and will now use the KF5 based Kate for all of my day job, perhaps that motivates me more to take a look at the issues the Qt5/KF5 port still has. (And I will work in a KDE Plasma 5 session with most stuff KF5 based now, including all important stuff like the nice Konsole ;=)

A couple of KDE dependent projects or even libraries have moved or are going to move to GPLv3.

Unfortunately, GPL v3 is incompatible with GPL v2. This means that it is not possible to create a project linking GPL v2 and v3 code together. There is no problem for projects which are licensed GPLv2+ (version 2 or above). Read More

Given that the KF5 based Kate works OK on Windows, I would like to get the Mac version up and running, too.

As virtualization of MacOS X is kind of “forbidden” and not that nicely usable anyway, as no nice accelerating drivers are available for the standard vm solutions, I just went out into the world and bought some Retina MacBook.

I followed the nice guide on https://github.com/haraldF/homebrew-kf5 (thanks Harald :=) and got some installed Kate/KWrite (after patching kio to skip X11 detection).

For my job, I need to take care of the support of old Linux distributions for our products, therefore I experimented in building Qt 5.x for Red Hat Enterprise 5 (or CentOS 5 or other clones).

Whereas Red Hat Enterprise 6 works more or less out of the box, to build Qt (even with WebKit and Co.) on Red Hat Enterprise 5, more work is needed. Even the xcb library is not yet existent there.

Recently, there were some thoughts on where KDE is going, and  related to that what’s the driving force behind it in terms of the pillars of KDE. Albeit it is true our development model changed significantly, I’m not convinced that it’s all about git.

No, I rather believe that it is the excitement about the KDE that makes it stand out – KDE as a community if you wish, but also KDE as a software project.

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!

Since KDE SC 4.10, Kate ships with the Projects plugin. This plugin provides an automatically generated structured list of files belonging to a project. Currently, in Kate 5, the Projects plugin looks like this:

What’s new in the Project plugin in Kate 5 since some weeks is an auto-loading feature. In 4.x times you needed to create a .kateproject file that was then read by the Projects plugin to populate the listview. This still works in Kate 5, of course. But if a .kateproject file does not exists, you can now still read the file list from the version control system. To this end, auto-loading for the respective version control system needs to be enabled in the settings (enabled by default):