KDE 

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:

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.

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

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.

Arrived at Berlin for Akademy/QtCon 2016, too ;=)

Already met some other KDE & Kate people, lets see how the week goes.

I was contacted by Buovjaga from the LibreOffice QA team to spread the word about the current bug triaging efforts going on.

Therefore now a short guest block about that ;=)

Thanks to Buovjaga for trying to get some public interest in this important aspect of open source work: handling our flood of bugs!

During the Randa sprint an 13 year old bug was fixed :P

I myself moved it to kxmlgui (out of Kate/KWrites’s harm, good to delegate stuff away :) in 2003 and since then we got a lot of duplicates but never somebody got the time to track it down. (333 votes for it, really nice number)

Now, after 13 years, it got done (and yet another chance that a bug becomes a sentient intelligence has vanished ;=)

I updated again the Kate/KWrite application bundles following the new guide on KDE on Mac.

With the same guide, other application developers should be able to create stand-alone application bundles for Mac OS X, too. Btw., the guide is on a wiki page, feel free to enhance the documentation, I doubt it is optimal ATM.

What needs to be solved to make it easier: At the moment, the guide uses a stock Qt as obtainable from qt.io but unfortunately, macdeployqt needs to be patched to deploy non-qt plugins