Users 

This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has started and the Kate project has been lucky to get two students who will work on improving Kate’s folding code and Vi input mode.

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Adrian will work on improving the folding code which is in need of an overhaul:

If you check Kate’s plugin list, you will recognize that there are two different tab bar plugins available. The first one is Tabify. This plugin adds a standard KDE tab bar to the top of Kate’s main window:

The plugin shows the same entries as the “Documents” tool view on the left. With drag&drop, the tabs can be moved around. In KDE SC <= 4.6.2 this plugin is called Tabify. In KDE SC >= 4.6.3 the name is simply “Tab Bar”.

Some days ago KDE 4.6 was branched. So what will Kate in KDE 4.6 bring?

• The new tree view as “Documents” sidebar completely replaces the old file list. It supports the simple list mode as well as a pseudo-intelligent tree view to group files. The “Documents” tab is now implemented as plugin (always loaded), meaning that it brought a code cleanup as well. We hope you like it! :)
• Swap file support, meaning that you can recover all your unsaved data for local files on the next Kate startup.
• Ability to always load plugins.
• New SQL Query plugin. The day we blogged about it had the most visits in the entire kate-editor.org history. So it seems the the SQL plugin is a really nice addon for web developers! :)
• New GNU Debugger (GDB) Plugin!
• New Highlight Selected Text Plugin.
• Ability to add scripts to the menu and bind shortcuts.
• Kate got a new homepage on http://www.kate-editor.org featuring WordPress.
• Lots of bugs fixed since the KDE 4.5.0 release.
• SmartCursors and SmartRanges are gone, resulting in more stable and clean code. MovingCursors and MovingRanges replace the old classes and work reliable. For instance, KDevelop is already ported leading to less crashes.
• Christoph found the emails of the early days of Kate again. A funny read! :)
• Daily unit test runs. We have more and more unit tests, securing the correct behavior of e.g. search&replace, the text buffer, encoding detection or indenters.
• Kate development mostly moved to KDE’s git infrastructure, resulting in very easy build instructions.
• The default settings of a session are now stored in the katerc file again, rendering the default.katesession obsolete. This means you will have to configure your default session again (sorry!). On the other hand, this fixed quite some bugs with regard to the session handling.

Credit where credit is due!

Kate has a new plugin called “Highlight Selection”. Since it is a KTextEditor plugin, it is available for all apps using KatePart (e.g.: Kile, Kate, KWrite, KDevelop etc). What does it do? If you select a whole word, all occurrences of this word are highlighted as well:

Hi! It’s me again. Got some exciting news.

The file tree is now the default (and only) document list/view widget. It actually took me by surprise. After I got the list mode and other features implemented, the old document list was unceremoniously ripped out, and extensions were added to allow kate to always load a given plugin, and give its settings tab a little more prominence.

Since then however I’ve fixed a few issues regarding the settings in the plugin. The file tree settings tab now sets the plugins global settings, and will clear out the setting overrides for the current session so they will get pulled from the global settings. And I just finished up adding back the “Go” menu, and the “next” and “prev” document shortcuts.

Have you, like me, had to switch to an external debugger or run raw gdb in the terminal plugin to debug the C/C++ application you develop with Kate? That might not be necessary any more. There is now a “GDB Plugin” in trunk that gives you the power of raw GDB with some QAction candy for the most common actions.

I have always been a bit frustrated with not having a debugger directly in Kate, but too lazy/busy to start a debugger plugin project. Fortunately Ian Wakeling started this GDB plugin and got it off the ground. When I got introduced to it at Akademy, it triggered an itch in me to get this plugin into kdesdk and to add some features for the more point and click type of persons. As it seemed I had a bit more free time to spend on the plugin, Ian let me take over as maintainer.

It’s me again. Given how much people seem to like the plugin, and that some would like to see this plugin replace the existing simple list view, I’ve put in a bit of work to make it so the tree view plugin replaces as much functionality of the original file list as possible.

There’s now a list mode (which was surprisingly easy to do), as well as the tree mode and I’ve extended the sorting support to include all but the “custom sort order” option of the original file list (it’ll take a bit more work to support that, if its something people actually use, I just haven’t felt like doing the work to get drag and drop to work, and before now it didn’t make much sense to add). While I was at it I also added a Settings Dialog Page for the plugin.