Kate

I just looked at our GitLab page today and thought: Amazing!

I thank you all for the great contributions of the last years.

Let's hope we see even more contributions in the future.

If you are unsure how to contribute, just take a look at the existing merged stuff as reference.

With the Qt 6.7 release, Qt introduced a wide range of improvement for the text rendering and font shaping.

One element of this is that you can now configure OpenType font features.

Many of the 'new cool' programming fonts have such features integrated. That includes both free fonts like Cascadia Code or paid fonts like MonoLisa.

Let's use the features of Cascadia Code as an example, that is the stuff they promote on their GitHub page:

G2 posted some fun logos for Kate on reddit.

I think they are nice and flashy and well suited if you want to show your appreciation for Kate and like that art style and a good addition to our awesome icon and mascot.

Static Version

Animated Version

Licensing

G2 licensed these files under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Feel free to share the stuff with this license and credit for G2.

So this is not quite an introduction since the plugin has been around for almost a year now, having been released in the 23.04 release but since I never got around to writing a blog about it, here I am.

In simple words, the formatting plugin allows one to format code easily and quickly. Well the "quickness" depends on the underlying code formatter but we try to be as quick as possible. So far if you wanted to do code formatting from within Kate, the only way to do that was to configure a tool in the External Tools plugin and then invoke it whenever you wanted to format the code. While this works it wasn't great for a few reasons. Firstly, you would loose undo history. Secondly, the buffer would jump and you would most likely loose your current position in the document. Thirdly, for every language you get a different tool and you need to remember the right tool to invoke on the right document type.