KDE Gear 22.08 Release in August

Next month the KDE Gear 22.08 release will arrive. Kate and KWrite are released with that collection of KDE software.

Thanks already to all people that make KDE Gear releases possible. I myself would not be able to release twice a year some proper version with patch releases, manage the i18n stuff, .... It is really a lot of work to get this done and I am very grateful to the KDE team members that take care of that! If you maintain some invent.kde.org hosted KDE application and want to have regular releases, I strongly suggest to join KDE Gear.

The current state up to KDE Gear 22.04

Kate & KWrite always existed as pair in the last 20 years.

KWrite was there first, a SDI editor already shipped with very early KDE versions.

Kate was started by me to have a MDI variant of KWrite.

KWrite was kept untouched, more or less, over the last 20 years beside minor improvements and bug fixes.

Naturally a lot features slipped in due to the fact that it uses KTextEditor as editor component.

Given the great work others did already on the Qt 6 porting of KDE Frameworks, let's take a look at Kate & KWrite on Qt 6.

With only minor patches, both applications now run on the current master state of KDE Frameworks and Qt 6.2.

Close to all functionality is available, I think the only stripped out part is the hot new stuff upload for snippets and I didn't test the Konsole part.

In the last few weeks we had time to nicely improve the general UI of our editor.

Naturally, the overall structure of the main window stays the same, with a central splitter area and some tool views around.

But if you take a look at the two screenshots below that show the last release and the current master branch version, you will spot some differences that in my eyes improve on what we have in a nice way.

Once more, Valentine's Day has arrived.

Like last year, Kate's development is nicely progressing this year, too.

Plenty of new stuff and fixes

We had a very successful year 2021 development wise.

As you can track on our merge requests page 348 requests got merged directly into Kate and 177 into the KTextEditor editor component.

The year 2022 already began well with 63 patches for Kate and 39 for KTextEditor.

Bugs, bugs, bugs...

The Kate & KTextEditor projects have at the moment 189 open bugs.

That is a lot given only a few people work on this projects regularly.

Therefore it would be really appreciated if people could help out with fixing.

If you have spare time and you are interested in help to improve our projects, head over to our long list of bugs.

COVID-19 Pandemic

Unfortunately, like the year 2020, for many people this was again no easy year. A lot of us and our families & friends are still directly or indirectly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like last year, I still hope the future will look less bleak now that vaccination is on the rise and perhaps we even have a bit luck with less deadly virus mutations in the future.

Soon the year ends, let's take a look at the current statistics of all applications in the Windows Store published with the KDE e.V. account.

Since the last summary in June, KDE Connect joined as newly available application! Thanks to all people that made this happen.

Last 30 days statistics

Here are the number of acquisitions for the last 30 days (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications: