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While setting up the new server for the Kate homepage, I actually found again old stuff ;)
Amazing that mails nearly ten years old can still be somewhere on the filesystem.
Perhaps a little hint, to post the beginnings of what today is Kate/KatePart/KWrite and KTextEditor.

Ten years ago, I asked the original author of KWrite, if he is interested in a MDI version of it (sorry, german, original mail):

KDE 4.5 will be released in the next days with the most polished Kate/KWrite and KatePart during the KDE 4.x series.

A lot of work went into fixing bugs and cleaning up old code for this release. Many important aspects where redone, just to enumerate a few:

• encoding detection & handling
• the text buffer
• the undo/redo system (thanks Bernhard)
• search/replace (thanks again Bernhard)
• handling cursors and ranges
• improved spell checking (thanks Michel)
• improved indentation (thanks Milian)
• speed improvements (Milian too)
• better JS scripting (Dominik)
• porting of KDevelop to new interfaces (David Nolden)

It will be the most unit-tested release of KatePart ever I guess, but still a long way to go until we have a good test coverage. (we just scratch the surface)

Hello,

today i will show you a new plugin for Kate, called KateSQL.
As you may have guessed, it brings to Kate the basic features of an SQL client, allowing you to open connections, execute queries, and display result data from SELECT statements or stored procedures.
Since this plugin makes an extreme use of the Qt Sql module, most of database drivers are supported..

Said this, let me explain how it works..

Since all of the Kate code is now co-hosted on gitorious, it became very easy to build Kate in your stable KDE >= 4.4 environment. This means you can run the newest version of Kate with very few effort. Just give it a try and do the following steps:

1. make sure you have the following packages installed: git, cmake and kdelibs development package (on openSUSE this is git, cmake and libkde4-devel)
2. create and change into a KDE development directory:
   mkdir ~/kde; cd ~/kde
3. get a copy of the Kate code:
   git clone git://gitorious.org/kate/kate.git
4. create and change into a build directory for compilation:
   mkdir build; cd build
5. run the configure process with cmake:
   cmake ../kate -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull <br /> -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/kde/usr
6. compile Kate:
   make
7. finally install Kate:
   make install

That’s all! This installs Kate locally into the separate directory ~/kde/usr, so that your global KDE installation will not be touched at all.

In my last blog I explained Kate’s scripting features in KDE 4.4. To better understand how scripting can be used let’s look at some use cases.

• join lines: This feature request wants the action “join lines” to not join different paragraphs, i.e. not remove empty lines. We have not implemented this wish, as there are probably users who prefer the current behaviour. This request can be fixed by writing a small script that joins the lines according to the user’s wishes.
• reformat paragraph: An intelligent reformatter for paragraphs. Should be rather straight forward to implement.
• XML tools: In KDE3, Kate once had a xmltools plugin. Unfortunately noone ported it to KDE4. The plugin provided lots of very useful features for xml editing. For example, you could select text and then wrap it with xml elements, e.g. “text” would become “textRead More

As mentioned in one of my last blogs, there has been quite some work for JavaScript scripting support in trunk recently. So what will Kate 3.4 (KDE 4.4) will bring? This is explained in detail in the sections:

• Indentation Scripting
• Command Line Scripting
• Some Remarks

The scripting allows to extend Kate with lots of little helper functions. All users can add scripts as they wish. The documentation here is copied from the official Kate handbook. So instead of using this blog as reference, please use the handbook later for an up-to-date version. To script something useful, you’ll need to know the scripting API. All the available functions are documented in the section Scripting API in the handbook as well. Enough said, here we go:

Since we now all know that Kate is holy (thanks to rms. By accident, he obviously confused Kate with emacs, though) let’s have a look at what’s going on. In the last months Kate development is quite active, so here is a quick update:

• new: on-the-fly spell checking thanks to Michel Ludwig. Highlights include e.g. spell checking in comments of source code or latex parts. Also, constructs like sch&#8221;on work in latex.
• extended scripting support in the command line, more on that later
• more and more mature vi input mode
• lots of bug fixing. quite impressive bug squashing by Pascal Létourneau for more than 4 months now
• lots of refactoring and code cleanups thanks to Bernhard!
• “Find in Files” appears by default again in the tool view,
• “File Browser” uses UrlNavigator, huge code cleanup
• convenience updates of syntax highlighting
• delayed highlighting of code folding ranges to prevent flickering on mouse move
• new command line commands: ‘toggle-header’ in the Open Header plugin. ‘grep’ and ‘find-in-files’
• haskell and lilypond indenter
• much, much more, see commits for details.

Thanks to all contributors involved in Kate development. Keep it up :)