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How to help with Kate development

If you want to help us develop Kate, KWrite or KatePart, you should join our mailing list. Contacting us at #kate on irc.libera.chat is also a good idea, we are always happy to help you get started.

How to Build Kate

Kate can easily be build on a current Linux distribution, we provide a tutorial about building Kate and the needed dependencies for this. For other operating systems, the same page provides extra links with information.

Contributing code

For contributions, the best way to hand them in is via our GitLab instance invent.kde.org.

How to set it up and use it is documented in the invent.kde.org documentation.

Just open a new merge request there for Kate. For more details about this, refer to this blog post.

If you want to get an overview about already accepted patches to get a feel how the process works, take a look at our merge requests page. Visiting some of these accepted requests might help to have a better grasp of project's workings.

Areas of work

The main work area is the programming, but if you are not a programmer you can help in many other areas:

  • Write and maintain documentation.
  • Write and maintain syntax highlight files.
  • Write and maintain scripts.
  • Maintain bug reports.
  • Provide us with useful feedback.
  • Help us by helping KDE. As a part of KDE, Kate benefits from the KDE as a whole, apart from the excellent integration provided by KDE the help from the KDE translation team is invaluable.

C/C++ Coding Standards

The code in our repositories shall follow the style described for KDE Frameworks.

The CMake tooling we use will setup appropriate pre-commit hooks to ensure this style using clang-format.

Documenting your code

We use Doxygen syntax to document code, and it’s nice to document everything, even private code, since other people than you might get to work on it or just try to understand it.

For comments inside of functions, C++ single-line comments are preferred over multi-line C comments.

Good starting points

You can take a look at our current list of issues, perhaps you are interested in taking care of one.