Users 

Since some weeks, the Kate homepage features a way to support Kate and KDE by donating money to the KDE e.V., see this screenshot:

The reason for showing a donation pane might not be obvious, since the KDE project is open source and mostly developed by lots of contributors in their free time. So why do we need money?

2021 Update: Kate's current mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker, a refreshed version of the mascot introduced in this post.

After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5  dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!

Since KDE SC 4.10, Kate ships with the Projects plugin. This plugin provides an automatically generated structured list of files belonging to a project. Currently, in Kate 5, the Projects plugin looks like this:

What’s new in the Project plugin in Kate 5 since some weeks is an auto-loading feature. In 4.x times you needed to create a .kateproject file that was then read by the Projects plugin to populate the listview. This still works in Kate 5, of course. But if a .kateproject file does not exists, you can now still read the file list from the version control system. To this end, auto-loading for the respective version control system needs to be enabled in the settings (enabled by default):

Hi,

from today on, the master branch of kate.git is KF5 based.

That means, for the next KDE applications release after 4.14, Kate will use the awesome KF5 stuff!

The KTextEditor framework is already in a good shape and most active KatePart development is since months pure KF5 based.

The same should now be true for Kate itself (and KWrite).

Pâté will need a lot of love, as PyQt5 is there, but PyKDE5/PyKF5 still in the works.

You like KDE software?

You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?

But you can’t help out yourself by coding, translating, bug finding, designing, documenting and whatever?

=> Feel free to fund our Randa Meetings 2014.

Perhaps it feels strange that a free/open source project wants money, but sprints & meetings are not for free, given you need to pay for the accommodations, travel, rooms for hacking, …

Happy news arrived on the kwrite-devel mailing list with this post before Easter ;)

Kate has won the advanced text editor comparison in the Linux Voice magazine – Issue 2, yeah ;)

Nice to see that our work on Kate is awarded.

About Linux Voice: Seems to be some pretty new magazine about Linux & Open Source (Issue 2 says it all) and they promise to give 50% of their profit back to the Free Software community, developers and events. Hope that works out, it is a nice goal.

This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly

• one line about what you like on Kate, and
• one line what you want improved.

Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! :-)

Kate comes with a build plugin, which supports running make, or ninja,  or actually any arbitrary command directly from within Kate. This is obvisouly  useful when using Kate as development editor, and this plugin has seen several improvements for the 4.13 release.

A small change, but for affected developers a major improvement, is that Kate  can now parse warning and error messages from the Intel compilers, icpc and icc.
So for those of you using icpc, Kate can now automatically jump to the line of code which caused the error. Actually you don’t have to wait for 4.13 for this, it is already available since 4.12.3.

Kate Part gained 17 new default styles in addition to the existing 14 default styles. These changes are available for Kate based on the KDE frameworks 5 initiative and currently live in ktexteditor.git module.

Default Styles are predefined font and color styles that are used by Kate Part’s syntax highlighting. For instance, Kate Part always had a default style for comments. Therewith, the comments in all syntax highlighting files look the same (by default, a gray color). Or keywords are by default always bold and black.