Users 

In recent KDE releases up to version 4.4 Kate unfortunately very often selected the wrong encoding. The result is that e.g. german umlauts (öäü) show up as cryptic signs in the text editor. What I’ve seen lots of times is that in this case people start to fix those characters manually for the entire document. In other words: They totally do not get at all that the text document simply was opened with the wrong encoding. Read More

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): Read More

Looking back at the last month, migrating our Kate homepage over to WordPress was a vast success. The useful content we had on our old Drupal was copied over. The benefit of WordPress is that we now have a nice blog software as well with which we even aggregate some external blogs related to Kate. The new homepage is also more structured by having a list of featured articles showing useful resources, such as links to user or developer documentation. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

A while ago I’ve blogged about the Kate’s most powerful plugins: the XML completion plugin. Thanks to Tomáš Trnka this plugin is back alive with all its features since today and compiled by default in trunk: It will be included in KDE 4.5. Yay! :) And if you need it already now for KDE 4.4, you can build Kate yourself very easily according to this howto, without touching your global KDE installation (probably interesting for KDE documentation writers! Read More

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: make sure you have the following packages installed: git, cmake and kdelibs development package (on openSUSE this is git, cmake and libkde4-devel) create and change into a KDE development directory: Read More

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. Read 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. Read More

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”on work in latex. Read More