Developers 

The next major step in Kate’s evolution is close: Kate based on KDE Frameworks 5.

Whereas it already works well enough for me (and others), it would be nice to clear out as many issues as possible before we have our first official KF 5 based release.

Our Bugzilla is full with smaller and larger Kate/KTextEditor (aka KatePart) issues, see:

• Our bugs in the KDE bugtracker
• Our wishes in the KDE bugtracker

Whereas Kate/KTextEditor has people working on it and continue to improve it over time, we don’t have enough people to keep track and care for all our reported bugs/wishs.

Hi,

from today on, the master branch of kate.git is KF5 based.

That means, for the next KDE applications release after 4.14, Kate will use the awesome KF5 stuff!

The KTextEditor framework is already in a good shape and most active KatePart development is since months pure KF5 based.

The same should now be true for Kate itself (and KWrite).

Pâté will need a lot of love, as PyQt5 is there, but PyKDE5/PyKF5 still in the works.

This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly

• one line about what you like on Kate, and
• one line what you want improved.

Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! :-)

Kate comes with a build plugin, which supports running make, or ninja,  or actually any arbitrary command directly from within Kate. This is obvisouly  useful when using Kate as development editor, and this plugin has seen several improvements for the 4.13 release.

A small change, but for affected developers a major improvement, is that Kate  can now parse warning and error messages from the Intel compilers, icpc and icc.
So for those of you using icpc, Kate can now automatically jump to the line of code which caused the error. Actually you don’t have to wait for 4.13 for this, it is already available since 4.12.3.

Kate Part gained 17 new default styles in addition to the existing 14 default styles. These changes are available for Kate based on the KDE frameworks 5 initiative and currently live in ktexteditor.git module.

Default Styles are predefined font and color styles that are used by Kate Part’s syntax highlighting. For instance, Kate Part always had a default style for comments. Therewith, the comments in all syntax highlighting files look the same (by default, a gray color). Or keywords are by default always bold and black.

In KDE SC 4.8, Kate was extended by the line modification indicators. These indicators show you what lines currently contain unsaved data, but also lines that were once changed but now are saved to disk:

With Kate in KDE 4.13, we have two new actions in the Edit menu:

Saturday most Kate developers will depart, therefore now the most work has been finalized (or at least brought to some intermediate state that works OK).

Below, the mandatory screenshot, Kate started without any configuration set in the framework branch, new and shiny:

Find the differences :P

And one screenshot with some files open:

After the first initial status bar integration into the KatePart, we thought a bit more about what users might expect. Looking at the competition, one common feature is to allow quick-switching the indentation settings.

Joseph gave that a try and we now have an even better version available in the KF5 KTextEditor framework.

Mandatory screenshot (KWrite, Kate or other applications using it will look the same), updated version after feedback below:(Update: Using now again non-bold + Line/Column swapped with status)

Just started to introduce a default status bar to KatePart.

Instead of  forcing all applications to implement an own one with varying quality and features, it provides a default status bar that is an improved variant of the status bar of the Kate application. Now Kate and KWrite have exactly the same features there ;)

If the host application doesn’t want that, the KTextEditor interface allows to deactivate it completely.