Events 

Since several years, we have lots of small developer meetings in the KDE project, gratefully supported by the KDE e.V. There, developers of a certain project (e.g. KMail/kdepim, Plasma, you name it) meet to discuss further plans and to push the project further. From experience we can tell that those meetings are really beneficial in several ways: Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor. Read More

We are 10 people here at the developer meeting in Berlin. Kate, KDevelop as well as Okteta see a lot of commits. I’ll mainly talk about what’s happening in the holy Kate land, though :-) Yesterday I closed a bug requesting an “unwrap” feature in Kate that works like “Tools > Join Lines” but maintains paragraph separation, i.e., empty lines are not removed. This feature is implemented now in javascript. Further infos: Read More

Hey everybody! If you are a KDevelop and/or Kate/Kwrite developer and do not read the mailing lists: There’s a hack sprint coming up in Berlin in 2010. I think there’ve been enough sprints in Berlin already so that you know it’s a great city for such an event. Though this time it won’t be at KDAB or Nokia offices, but at the Physics Faculty of the FU-Berlin. Since I (currently) work there as an IT admin, it was my first choice and worked out. Read More

This Akademy’s Kate changes include fix: drag & drop of text code completion: only show group header if the group name is not empty reintroduction of buffer blocks in Kate’s document buffer (one buffer contains up to 4096 lines). The blocks build a linked list. Editing a 500 MB file kind of works now again. It’s still rather slow, though. more speedup in Kate’s document buffer Kate is using KEncodingProber instead of KEncodingDetector now generate internal version of KatePart automatically, so developers don’t have to adapt it manually each release python encoding detection plugin that warns if encoding is not correct while saving new plugin: Backtrace browser, mainly for developers find in files: several speed optimizations find in files: progress indicator while search is active find in files: redesign of workflow. Read More

The Kate Developer Meeting was a productive weekend and once more shows how important the developer sprints are. The summary will be on the dot shortly. Work already started on several topics. As everyone want screenshots, here we go: The new annotation interface available now in KTextEditor can be use to e.g. show svn annotations directly in kate: basysKom’s coffee maching is simply the best: It can do everything, you just have to press the right key combos:

The below notes is what was decided at the development sprint in Darmstadt on April 11-13, 2008 Short term goals Scripting, part level QtScript API for indentation scripts Sessions handling make text completion work! VI-Modes (GSoC-project) Long term goals Scripting at application level (Kate): Kross Combination of highlightings & indentations Table of Contents Scripting Indentation Kate Sessions Extending the highlighting system (Highlighting combination) Collaborative editing Text input modes (vi mode) Minor topics: Search & Replace, text completion Interface Review Simplifying KWrite Scripting Use cases indentation helper scripts + assign shortcut useful for vi-mode scripting right now: kjs (barely documented, future uncertain) choices: Kross, QtScript Kross: language independent, depends on available bindings/plugins at runtime QtScript, Kross: simply wrap QObjects (signals/slots, Q_SCRIPTABLE automatically exported) Kate Part: QtScript flexible integration possible make it fast for specific use cases (e. Read More

Finally it all begins: Anders and Joseph arrived at basysKom and we’ve started to discuss some things we want to do for KDE 4.1. Later, we are going to meet with the rest of the attendees in a restaurant to get to know each other. The official start of the meeting is tomorrow morning. If you are interested in contributing to Kate, just join #kate on irc.libera.chat. I’m looking forward to the next two days :)

In April there will be a Kate Developer Sprint, similar to previous sprints for Decibel, Akonadi, KDevelop and others. This is a great opportunity as developers interested in development of KDE’s text editor will discuss what to do to make Kate the best text editor on earth. This also means lots of polishing so that Kate in KDE 4.1 will shine even more! The meeting will take place from 2008-04-11 till 2008-04-13. Read More