Posts 

I am the original author of the Lumen KTextEditor plugin and I am happy to announce, I just committed it to the Kate repository for KDE 4.13! Lumen is just the name for a plugin providing code-completion for the D programming language in KTextEditor/Kate and KDevelop. But Lumen is just a connection between the editor and the D Completion Daemon (a server providing all the information) called DCD. The plugin currently supports all major features of the completion server: feeding the server with import files, displaying documentation and several types of completion: 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. While this calculation is a bit theoretical, it is still very valid to estimate the amount of work that is put into these projects during such a sprint, especially since usually developers have far less time for development in their spare 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: Read More

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) Read More

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

I thought I’d share a very interesting read about how to wrap the lua C bindings with C++11 variadic templates: part 1, part 2, part 3. These type of cool articles pop up from time to time on reddit/r/cpp, so if you are interested in C++ topics, this is definitely worth to follow.

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? Kate will get more polishing in the next 4.x releases, for instance, in KDE SC 4.13 Kate optionally supports animated bracket matching. 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.org) or added themselves to the relicensecheck.pl in kde-dev-scripts.git. Read More