Users 

In KDE SC 4.8, Kate was extended by the line modification indicators. These indicators show you what lines currently contain unsaved data, but also lines that were once changed but now are saved to disk:

With Kate in KDE 4.13, we have two new actions in the Edit menu:

Saturday most Kate developers will depart, therefore now the most work has been finalized (or at least brought to some intermediate state that works OK).

Below, the mandatory screenshot, Kate started without any configuration set in the framework branch, new and shiny:

Find the differences :P

And one screenshot with some files open:

After the first initial status bar integration into the KatePart, we thought a bit more about what users might expect. Looking at the competition, one common feature is to allow quick-switching the indentation settings.

Joseph gave that a try and we now have an even better version available in the KF5 KTextEditor framework.

Mandatory screenshot (KWrite, Kate or other applications using it will look the same), updated version after feedback below:(Update: Using now again non-bold + Line/Column swapped with status)

Just started to introduce a default status bar to KatePart.

Instead of  forcing all applications to implement an own one with varying quality and features, it provides a default status bar that is an improved variant of the status bar of the Kate application. Now Kate and KWrite have exactly the same features there ;)

If the host application doesn’t want that, the KTextEditor interface allows to deactivate it completely.

Here we sit, in Barcelona, hacking away at KTextEditor & Kate.
During the first 2 days, we already got some stuff done, like cleaning up KTextEditor interfaces and port more parts to KF5 (like ctags plugin, sql plugin, …).

More and more, KTextEditor & Kate get into a usable state for frameworks ;)
It is really good to have some free days in a nice location to focus on that goal!

This is a follow-up to Aaron’s blog Frameworks 5: Timing is everything, put into the perspective of Kate and the KTextEditor interfaces. In short, Aaron suggests application developers the following:

When Frameworks 5 has a firm release schedule, then it makes sense to start coordinating application releases targets with that and syncing up development cycles.

I agree with this entirely, provided it’s really about applications. In the context of Kate, this is not the case, since the term ‘Kate’ usually also refers to the ‘KTextEditor’ interfaces along with its implementation ‘Kate Part’.

Since the KDE SC 4.12 release a month ago, it’s about time to look at the changes of Kate in 4.12:

• Vi input mode: complete macro support
• Heavily improved vi input mode
• Multi-column text editing (thanks to Andrey Matveyakin)
• MiniMap: align to the top (instead of vertically centered)
• Projects plugin: modified files now show a modified icon
• Improved C++/Boost Style indenter
• in total, 21 issues (including wishes and bugs) were fixed

What comes next?

Kate will get more polishing in the next 4.x releases, for instance, in KDE SC 4.13 Kate optionally supports animated bracket matching.

Hi,

a long time ago, the license of most parts of Kate/KWrite/KatePart/KTextEditor was LGPLv2+ (in the old time, where it was named KWritePart/Kant/…, the original KWrite had that license originally, at least all parts of the component of it).

Then, we changed that to be LGPLv2 (only).

It seems, that was a poor choice, as we now run in v2 vs. v3 vs. any later version problems.

In KDE 4, you can open a new window for Kate via “View -> New Window”.

This won’t start a new application instance but just add an other Kate main window to the current instance (which shows the same documents & session & projects).

This is kind of complex to handle internally and we think about dropping that behavior and instead launching just an other Kate application instance if you trigger that menu action.