Posts 

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

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