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: Move to Previous Modified Line Move to Next Modified Line In the screenshot above, moving to the next modified line does nothing, since we are already at the very end of the document. Read More

From 18th to 25th of January 2014, the Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona to work on these projects full time for a week. Full time usually implies about 14 hours per person a day (yes, besides food, we do nothing but developing). 11 developers working 14 hours a day for 7 days makes a total of 1078 hours. If we divide this by 8 hours, the typical amount of work hours in a day, this makes 134 man-days of work, or about 27 weeks of continued development time. Read More

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. Read More

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! Read More

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’. Read More

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? Read More

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. Most parts of the code are easy to relicense, as the contributors either acknowledged the request to change the license to that to the Kate team (on kwrite-devel@kde. Read More

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. Read More