Kate | Get an Edge in Editing

The new LSP client by Mark Nauwelaerts made nice progress since the LSP client restart post last week. Reminder: The plugin is not compiled per default, you can turn it on via: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=“your prefix” -DENABLE_LSPCLIENT=ON “kate src dir” The code can still be found kate.git master, see lspclient in the addons directory. What is new? Diagnostics support: A tab in the LSP client toolview will show the diagnistics, grouped by file with links to jump to the locations. [Read More]

Since my last post about the LSP client progress in May I didn’t work on that project at all I think. But the good news is, somebody else did scratch that itch on his own ;=) We have now a prototype plugin in kate.git master, see lspclient in the addons directory. It is not compiled per default, you can turn it on via: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=“your prefix” -DENABLE_LSPCLIENT=ON “kate src dir” [Read More]

While browsing the ISO C++ homepage I stumbled over the results PDF of the Second Annual C++ Foundation Developer Survey “Lite”. I was astonished that Kate made it into the “Which development environments (IDEs) or editors do you use for C++ development?” results. ;=) Seems not only I use it as my normal editor for working on C++ code. And heads up, KDevelop is there, too! This is actually the second survey, I missed to notice the first one last year. [Read More]

Two days ago I mentioned here that the bug report count of KTextEditor and Kate has risen to some not that manageable amount. For developers that report a bugs or wish, the best way to really get it solved is to scratch your own itch and provide some patch. I know this is not feasible for all bug reporters, as not all are developers nor will even the developers all have either time nor perhaps the right skill set to tackle the issue on their own. [Read More]

The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200. If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated. The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query. Easy things anybody with a bit time could do would be: check if the bug still is there with current master builds, if not, close it it check if it is the duplicate of a similar still open bug, if yes, mark it as duplicate Beside that, patches for any of the existing issues are very welcome. [Read More]

The Kate lsp branch contains now the infrastructure as used by Qt Creator. In addition, clangd is now somehow started in a working state for the first project opened inside Kate. For example, if you use the CMake Kate project generator and you compile Kate from the “lsp” branch, clangd should pick up the compile_commands.json for a CMake generated Kate project. ;=) Unfortunately not much more than starting and informing clangd about the open workspaces (for the first opened project) works ATM. [Read More]

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) allows the integration of stuff like code completion, jump to definition, symbol search and more into an application without manual re-implementation for each language one wants to support. LSP doesn’t fully allow an integration like KDevelop or Qt Creator do with the libclang based tooling aimed for C/C++ but on the other side offers the possibility to interface with plenty of languages without a large effort on the client side. [Read More]

As you can read in the official Creator 4.9.0 release announcement, Qt Creator now uses the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework for providing the generic highlighting. This is a nice step for the wider adoption of this MIT licensed part of the KDE Frameworks. And this is not just an one-way consumption of our work. The framework got actively patches back that make it more usable for other consumers, too, like Kate ;=) [Read More]

Today I did run again into an old problem: You need to archive a lot small and large files inside a single Git repository and you have no support for Git LFS available. You did this several year and now you ended up in a state where cloning and working with the repository is unbearable slow. What now? Last time I did run into that, I archived the overfull repository to some “rest in peace” space and used git filter-branch to filter out no longer needed and too large objects from a repository copy that then will replace the old one for daily use. [Read More]

During my web site upgrade, I reviewed the old stuff I had hosted on my long gone web sites but still archived here locally. An interesting thing I stumbled on are the KDE 3 -> 4 porting screenshots of Kate I saved in 2005. They actually show pretty nicely how far we have gone since 2005 with our development stack. The KDE 3 -> 4 transition was a large hassle. It did take weeks of work just to get Kate back into an usable state. [Read More]