Posts 

In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar. Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p): Read More

In the kate.git master branch the text folding is now new and shiny. In addition to be faster and less memory hungry (no folding tree is around if you fold nothing, it is only created on-demand exactly for the folded regions), the new code is less complex and smaller (and hopefully better documented + unit tested, it actually has a test for most internal operations). There is actually now a clean separation, the folding does not mix with highlighting and can be used without it, too. Read More

If we look at the incoming bug reports, a lot still seem to be located in our code folding implementation. The problem of the current code folding code, even after the GSoC rewrite of large parts, is that it is inter weaved with the syntax highlighting engine. During highlighting, we try to build up some tree containing all folding start/ends. To accommodate languages that have indentation based folding like Python, we started to fake such starts/ends which are normally tokens like { or }. As these tree can be unbalanced and contain overlapping regions, the implementation is quiet complex. Read More

In the recent months Kate saw quite some contributions from developers other than “the usual kate developers”. This is really cool, areas include more work on python plugins, a lot of bug fixing and fine tuning in the vi input mode, an improved python indenter, and more unit tests. Especially one unit test turned out to be immensely useful and resulted in a fix for the infamous “rangesForLine” crash (about 40 times reported). We even decided to backport this to KDE 4.10.2, so KDevelopers and Kile LaTeXers please keep an eye open on whether this has any side effects! Read More

I was a long time Vim holdout and often wondered to myself, “just why do those nutheads use vim?” until I googled and read the blog I just linked. After trying Vim out for a few days, I was completely hooked, but didn’t want to leave KDevelop with its awesome Intellisense/ code completion/ navigation features. Thankfully, Kate has a Vim mode, so I could get the best of both worlds :) Read More

Okular, KDE’s universal document viewer, has a really cool feature I’m using for years already: “Go > Forward” and “Go > Backward”. These two actions allow to quickly jump to positions in the document where you came from in a chronological order. Consider e.g. reading the phrase “As shown in [15], …”, and you want to know quickly lookup reference [15]. So you click on it, and okular will jump to the list of references. And “Go > Back” will bring you back to exactly the position where you came from. Read More

In 2012, Kate had a GSoC project with the aim of adding a Scripting IDE plugin. The idea was to make it easy to write Kate Part scripts (command line scripts, indenters), that should include rudimentary code completion and a gui to manage available scripts. As detailed in the blog post, a rudimentary list that showed all available scripts is available. However, due to changes in Kate Part’s scripting framework (e.g. changes in the folder structure, require() function to load libraries), the plugin in its current form is not applicable anymore. Still, the idea of having a better JavaScript support is valid. Read More

Now the statistics of the kate.git are online for public viewing. They will be updated daily, located on: /stats/ Unfortunately, the statistics of the last years are not that “representative”, as the moves of Kate around in SVN and to Git biased the statistics, as I did a lot of the commits for syncing and moving and so on. Still it is amazing how MANY people did contribute during Kate’s history! (see Kate Authors) Read More

The Projects plugin in Kate just gained a context menu for the tree view that shows several git tools, if available: Clicking will open the corresponding application in the correct working directory. Currently, only gitk, qgit and git-cola are supported. If you want more git integration, you probably have to use KDevelop or QtCreator :-) Read More

The project plugin in kate.git master now has four new more plugins, with many features in each one: Python (autocomplete, smart snippets, parse checker, pep8 checker and pyflakes checker), Javascript (autocompletes, jquery snippet, pretty JSON, and jslint checker), Django (smart snippets and utils to Django template) and XML (pretty xml). There are also many generic functions and generic classes in these that will be useful to the new plugins developers. Read More