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Finally some sustainable announcements about the future of Qt and its open governance project: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/ http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/ I hope this will be well received and we will see yet another increase in contributions to our Qt/KDE ecosystem ;) Thanks for all the effort to all people who made this possible!

Christoph and me cleaned up the visualization of the code folding for KDE 4.8 a bit. In the snapshot, the left image shows the old behavior, and the right one shows the new behavior. The background highlighting appears as soon as you hover over the code folding bar. We hope you like it :) Mockups of how to make it even better are welcome, of course! You can try it by building Kate yourself, if you want.

Some days ago, Dominik implemented a line modification system in the KatePart. For all who don’t know what that means at all (like me before the DS 2011), here some screenshots. First, starting with a fresh loaded file: Now, lets write some lines: Next, after saving: Read More

Once in a while, there are really interesting blogs, presentations and reports about how to do things right as software developer. This is a quick list of links about API design and coding style: Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs (Qt4), by Matthias Ettrich, 2005 API Design Principles, extended version of (1), Qt Developer Network (Nokia) The Little Manual of API Design, an in-depth summary of (1) and (2), Jasmin Blanchette, 2008 (Nokia) Developing Quality Libraries, presentation of (1)-(3) on the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria, Oliver Goffart, 2009 How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters, Joshua Bloch, 2007 (Google) Qt Coding Style, good coding style not limited to Qt, Qt Developer Network (Nokia) Guidelines for KDE Development, similar to e.g. (6), KDE Techbase Hall of API Shame: Boolean Trap, Ariya Hidayat, 2011 Thanks to all the authors for sharing & happy reading! Read More

Soon the GSoC projects of this year are over again. I would like to thank our two students Adrian Lungu and Svyatoslav Kuzmich for their work! They both did a nice job and improved both the code folding and the vi mode a lot. Thanks to them and I hope they stick around in our project, more help is always welcome ;) And thanks to Google for sponsoring their efforts.

As part of Christophs idea to give Kate a new face, it would be nice also to have a Kate banner, that every Kate fan can use to show in the Web. Something like the following, but any ideas are welcome!

After adding the new design to the Kate homepage, I got some feedback about broken fonts and other stuff. Most should be fixed now, e.g. the “The Team” page now looks kind of okay again. In addition, we now have some nice feed display with the latest commits and overall a bit cleanup page. For mobile devices, like my Android phone, we now have WPtouch installed, which provides some rather nice layout for small screens (but allows easy switch back to normal layout, too). Read More

Hi everyone! So… this GSoC season came to its end. This week is the official deadline for the projects and, happily, my project is done, but my collaboration with Kate is just starting, so I’ll see you around :) As I mentioned in the previous post, I used this last week for some fine tuning and to close the bugs that slipped the previous scan. The folding-related bugs remained on bug.kde.org are highlight related too, so I can’t do much about them. The folding submenu was changed, so we can add more features into the feature. You can find the old and the new folding’s submenus in this article. You can see that the new folding has new features and it’s more flexible. Now you can fold/unfold a specific level entirely, or you can fold/unfold the node that contains the cursor. I have one regret regarding these new features: we couldn’t find some key-shortcuts for them :( Read More

2021 Update: Kate's current mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker. Kate’s icon is quiet nice, but for our website and other stuff, it would be really cool to have some eye catcher and something to know: yeah, that is Kate :) As Kate is obviously a woman, at least in most languages, it would be quiet nice if some artist could come up with a painted or rendered one to put on our page. Read More

Just as proof that we really were at the desktop summit in Berlin: We Kate developers sat one evening together for dinner. From left to right: Kate’s plugin master, the Holy Belliness, KDevelop, Gnome, Kate Finder, Kate Vi Mode, Kate Snippets (and myself not visible, taking the photo) :-)