Posts 

In KDE 4.10, Kate Part got a new MessageInterface. The idea of this interface is to have a standardized way of showing notifications in a non-intrusive way, similar to how KMessageWidget in kdelibs works. Using the MessageInterface is extremly easy, for instance to show a quick notification, you write KTextEditor::Message *message = new KTextEditor::Message(KTextEditor::Message::Positive, "Code successfully reformated."); document->postMessage(message); That’s basically it! The result looks like this (with a nice fade-in and fade-out animation): Read More

Loading huge files over the internet may take quite a long time. In KDE 4.10, Kate Part will show a passive message after 1 second that tells you the file is still being loaded, and, if wanted, the user can abort the loading process. It looks like this: This also fixes bug #128273. Again, cookies go to Christoph ;) Read More

During our long bug hunting and fixing sprint I came along some nasty BiDi or Unicode related bugs. I and most others in the Kate team are not really able to fix such issues :( We lack both the knowledge of the underlying techniques and are not able to write/read any language that really uses complex unicode chars or BiDi text. Therefore: If you know Qt and you want to help out with fixing BiDi/Unicode related bugs, please provide patches for them in the KDE Bugzilla! Read More

One of the results of the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna is the new “MiniMap” that can be used instead of the vertical scrollbar. I came to the sprint with a black and white version of it for the symbols viewer, but got encouraged to integrate it to the core. The result, in cooperation with Sven Brauch from KDevelop, is a nice Mini-Map that can be enabled both in Kate and KDevelop. Read More

Update (2014-10-18): Auto-Loading Projects in Kate 5 Introducing the Projects Plugin for KDE SC 4.10 The basic idea of the Projects plugin is to have a structured list of files belonging to the project with the following properties: provide a structured view of the files make it easy and very fast to open and switch projects support search & replace for a project provide simple auto completion make it simple to quickly open files in the project support for building the project We’re going to address all these points now. Read More

Currently we are at the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna. Christoph and me took the time to look a bit around in the net for Kate, and more or less accidently stumbled over quite a lot of extensions by our users. Here are some examples: script to jump to next/previous paragraph several really good highlighting files, e.g. for C++11 several Kate plugins written in Python many more python plugins for Kate, even officially listed in the Python index there is more, I won’t list it all :) Kate has just about 20 plugins written in C++. And, ironically, there are more plugins for Kate written in python. This is totally awesome, but still, the Kate developers didn’t even know about it ?¿? :-o Read More

Another quick update: Jowenn just implemented a decent tool tip that displays the current view line while scrolling, a wish from 9 years ago. Mandatory screenshot (pimped with my “awesome” Gimp skills):

Up to KDE 4.9, Kate Part had support to remove trailing spaces in two ways: Remove trailing spaces while editing Remove trailing spaces on save The reasoning behind removing trailing spaces while editing is that when working on a document, we want to keep our own changes clean of trailing spaces. This way, we can for instance provide patches that are not cluttered with whitespace changes, and we just change lines that we really want to change. Read More

KDE has all these little nifty features, and – guess what – Kate has them, too. Here, we’ll have a look at how to delete a file with Kate. We’ll start with opening the file we want to delete. Example: Next, we open the menu File > Open With and choose Other… as follows: We’re almost done: Type ‘rm’ in the Open With dialog: Read More

Recently I’ve blogged about the usage of KMessageWidget in the data recovery process in Kate Part. Finally, we decided to stick with KMessageWidget, since it is a standard kdelibs widget, used by a lot of KDE applications. Besides, it is visually appealing and attracts the user’s attention. In KDE SC 4.10, it will look like this: Now if you recover the data, it may happen that the swap file is broken, e.g. because it was accidently manipulated for whatever reason. Then you get notified like this: Read More