Events 

Today, I will travel back home from Akademy 2015. I must say, it was really a nice KDE meeting and I had a lot of fun ;=) The first day the KDE e.V. general assembly did take place, then two days of actually interesting talks (including the great announcement of Plasma Mobile). After some more days with interesting BoFs and hacking, Akademy is now ending for me. I didn’t do that much work on Kate, I mostly did small bugfixes for the applications bundled with the KDE Applications releases regarding their HiDPI support, finally no Konsole that can’t redraw correctly on scrolling on a HiDPI screen with scaling activated! Read More

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. Read More

Only some days until the yearly Akademy starts. Its a real great thing to get known to other KDE/Qt contributors and meet old and new friends. Already amazed, lets hope the airlines don’t go on strike during my travel :=) See you all there, lets have fun & be productive! Already now thanks to all people that help to organize this cool event and all our sponsors!

From 18th to 25th of January 2014, the Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona to work on these projects full time for a week. Full time usually implies about 14 hours per person a day (yes, besides food, we do nothing but developing). 11 developers working 14 hours a day for 7 days makes a total of 1078 hours. If we divide this by 8 hours, the typical amount of work hours in a day, this makes 134 man-days of work, or about 27 weeks of continued development time. Read More

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. Read More

This is a follow-up to Aaron’s blog Frameworks 5: Timing is everything, put into the perspective of Kate and the KTextEditor interfaces. In short, Aaron suggests application developers the following: When Frameworks 5 has a firm release schedule, then it makes sense to start coordinating application releases targets with that and syncing up development cycles. I agree with this entirely, provided it’s really about applications. In the context of Kate, this is not the case, since the term ‘Kate’ usually also refers to the ‘KTextEditor’ interfaces along with its implementation ‘Kate Part’. Read More

So Akademy 2013 is nearing and this time it takes place at Bilbao, Spain. As it happens, Bilbao is located quite near to the beach as well as very close to the mountains. So I stumbled over a page with several hiking trails starting in Bilbao ranging from easy to hard. For instance, this route starts in a nearby village and then goes from about 65 meters in height up to 1000 (this is the point where you stop to hack on KDE, of course), and then down to 30 in Bilbao again. Read More

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. Read More