Posts 

Another release cycle gone, and the KDE Software Compilation 4.11 is out in the open (well, for quite some time already), and with that it is time to talk about what changed in Kate the last half year since the 4.10 release. Besides the usual bug fixing (~50 bugs since 4.10), the following sections present some major improvements and features of Kate in 4.11. Read More

Hi all, Just an eye-glazingly brief blog post about some of the stuff I’ve been working on in the Kate Vim emulation mode since my last blog. Once more, I’ll mostly be dumping them all as bullet points, Gräßlin-Style™, with some longer sections on the more important changes, but this time around I’ve added some nifty animated gifs which you can skip to should the full text prove too harrowing! In roughly chronological order, I: Read More

Hi, if you ever use the TBB (Intel Threading Building Blocks) allocator to overwrite malloc/free/* and want to use Valgrind for leak checking and fail, here is the simple trick to get it working: valgrind --soname-synonyms=somalloc=\*tbbmalloc\* <your-application-here> I missed that hint in the Valgrind documentation for my first tries ;) Btw., the scalable allocator from TBB is a really BIG improvement over the normal system allocator on current Linux & Windows machines if you allocate mostly fixed size small object, like what happens if you heavily use STL data structures like std::map/set that are implemented as trees and you have other stuff like DOM/AST like data structures (even in the single threaded case, for which it just saves a LOT of memory). Read More

In my job I work on binary and source level analysis software running on Linux and Windows. One of my tasks is to maintain the build farm and compile environment, therefore I am responsible for keeping care of the compilers and libraries we use (like the beloved Qt, congratulations for the nice 5.1 release, btw.). For Linux, we normally use the GNU C/C++ compiler. That works out very well since years. We have hit compiler bugs only a few times and there was always already some patch-release out in the wild that fixed our issues. In addition the GCC developers brought a constant stream of improvements in the area of C and C++ standard compliance. I am more than happy with the GCC quality. Read More

I’m currently using QUndoStack in a project of mine. A QUndoStack contains a list of QUndoCommands which then can be executed with QUndoStack::undo() and QUndoStack:.redo(). Now I thought when deleting an instance of the class Node, I can just hock the creation of the respective UndoDeleteNode class (derived from QUndoCommand) into the destructor, like this: class Node { public: // ... ~Node() { undoStack()->push(new UndoDeleteNode(this)); } }; class UndoDeleteNode : public QUndoCommand { public: // ... void undo() { // create node again } void redo() { // delete node again } }; Now the problem with this code is, that executing UndoDeleteNode::redo() will delete the node through the undo/redo system. In this case, the destructor ~Node() will create another UndoDeleteNode item. So what I was looking for a way to only create the undo item when the undo/redo system is not active, i.e.: Read More

So Akademy 2013 is nearing and this time it takes place at Bilbao, Spain. As it happens, Bilbao is located quite near to the beach as well as very close to the mountains. So I stumbled over a page with several hiking trails starting in Bilbao ranging from easy to hard. For instance, this route starts in a nearby village and then goes from about 65 meters in height up to 1000 (this is the point where you stop to hack on KDE, of course), and then down to 30 in Bilbao again. Anyone? :-) Read More

In a project I’m currently working on I need to display the result of TeX code. So I thought it would be nice and accurate to compile the TeX code to produce a pdf, and then use libpoppler-qt4 to draw the pdf. This works in principal, but there is a licensing problem: libpoppler is GPL, and I want to use it in a LGPL library. So I searched the net and found dvipng, which converts a dvi file to png. It even supports transparent backgrounds. So I could convert the dvi file to png through QProcess+dvipng, and then display the png file. This works, but whenever you scale the canvas the result looks ugly since png is not a vector graphic. Read More

I have done some improvements in the plugins: python_console_ipython, python_autocomplete, python_utils, js_utils, xml_pretty and django_utils. These plugins I added a month and a half ago (except python_console_ipython) to the kate repository. I have done two improvements and a new feature: Now they work with Python2 and Python3 (except python_autocomplete, this only works with Python2, due pysmell dependence) Now they have a configuration page (except python_autocomplete, this should not have configuration parameters) Read More

If someone is interested in doing some coding for Kate-Part, Kate, KTexteditor during this years Summer of Code, just drop a proposal at the kwrite-devel mailing list for discussion.

I just started to clean up the content of kate.git, moving things around, fixing compile warnings and similar stuff. I stumbled over warnings in our dbus interfaces. The main use of them is to allow Kate to reuse an existing instance for opening files and sessions. This part (e.g. the interface of the application object itself) works fine and is needed. But all other interfaces, like the ones for docmanager, mainwindows, … are mostly non-existant or not implemented. I now play with the idea of just removing the nearly empty skeleton implementations, as it seems nobody missed them during the complete 4.x series. Read More