KDE 

The end of the joint Kate/KDevelop Sprint 2015 is coming closer, half of the people already have left to get home.

It was a good thing to have this sprint sponsored by the KDE e.V. and organized by Milian Wolff directly after the Qt World Summit 2015 here in Berlin. I think that made it easier for people to attend both events, like myself ;=)

I came to the sprint to work on getting our bugs sorted and fixed and to improve the state of the Mac port. I must confess, the bug fixing session worked out well, but I didn’t take a shot at Mac at all.

From the 7th to the 11th of October Kate and KDevelop contricutors once again met to work on both Kate and KDevelop.

The work in Kate was mostly spent on fixing bugs, as can be seen by the following bug chart for Kate:

That is, more than 300 bug and wish reports were closed. Granted, many of the reports were just old and given our limited manpower we were closing many wishes since it is unlikely that old wishes get implemented. Then again, we also fixed a lot of bugs that required code changes, and also fine tuning of KTextEditor and Kate. The fixed bugs are roughly KDE bug tracker (yes, the auto-brackets option is back!), besides there are also a lot of changes there were not listed in bug reports. We hope the changes are useful to you, so be sure to get the KDE Frameworks version 5.16 as soon as it’s released :-)

This week is really busy, first three days of Qt World Summit and now hacking away at the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Berlin.

This year my personal goal will be to get our bugs & wishes back into shape.

One major decision I as the maintainer did take was to close all wishes that not got changed since two years. Our team is very small and we have plenty of real bugs to take care of (and their number is rising) such that we will never be able to implement random requests.

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!

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 ;=)

I reinstalled my home machine last week with openSUSE 13.2 and installed their latest 15.04 packages from the KDE repos ;=)

That is the first time that I use a distro-shipped Kate that is based on KF5 (and no other Kate 4.x is installed any more as escape route).

I think I already have seen 1-2 glitches (like not needed questions for reload and some repaint issue on reload), still, overall, I am happy with what is shipped as 15.04.

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).