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Soon the year ends, let's take a look at the current statistics of all applications in the Windows Store published with the KDE e.V. account. Since the last summary in June, KDE Connect joined as newly available application! Thanks to all people that made this happen. Last 30 days statistics Here are the number of acquisitions for the last 30 days (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications: Read More

So about a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to try out Flutter for desktop app development. If you don't know about Flutter, it's a UI framework for cross-platform app development by Google. After reading a little bit about Dart, I decided to dive in directly and write a basic app in Dart. To my surprise Kate didn't support Dart at all, there was no syntax-highlighting, no anything, not even Dart file detection. However, Kate does have an LSP Client which supports semantic highlighting but to my disappointment it turned out that our LSP Client didn't work too well with Dart's LSP server. This was enough, something needed to be done immediately. Here's the short plan I made to support Dart: Read More

Now that Akademy 2021 has started, let's take a look at the current statistics of all applications in the Windows Store published with the KDE e.V. account. Last 30 days statistics Here are the number of acquisitions for the last 30 days (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications: Okular - More than a reader - 5,674 acquisitions Kate - Advanced Text Editor - 3,701 acquisitions Read More

Starting with the KDE Frameworks 5.84 release, KXMLGUI based applications will feature expandable tooltips per default. The matching merge request by Felix Ernst got merged today after 3 months ;=) What are expandable tooltips at all? Good question ;=) In short: for stuff like menu & toolbar actions, it provides an easy way to access the "What's This?" help. Unlike before, where you need to manually trigger that via the "Shift-F1" shortcut and click around to try out which GUI elements provide at all this additional help, you will now first get a small tooltip with the normal tooltip content (if any) and a hint that with "Shift" you are able to get more help displayed. Read More

KDE Gear 21.04 including Kate out in the wild! KDE Gear 21.04 was released some weeks ago. If you use some distribution like e.g. the rolling release Arch Linux (or Arch derivates like Manjaro), you might already have updated to Kate from that release. As show in the 21.04 pre-release post, Kate 21.04 really has some nifty new features and improvements on all fronts over 20.12. Window Store Update => Done! Unfortunately, unlike for the Linux (or BSD and alike) distributions, where the hard working packagers do the work for us, for e.g. the Windows Store updates, we must do this on our own. Read More

A lot of good things happen at the moment in Kate's development. We didn't only implement plenty of new features for 21.04 and fix a lot of bugs in the last months and year, we did improve our overall product branding, too. Early in 2020, we introduced a new Kate icon designed by Tyson Tan to get some icon that is instantly recognizable compared to the generic ones we used in the past. Read More

Nifty new feature in Kate for KDE Gear 21.04 So OK the previous blog was a bit exaggerated. There is no AI in the works (right now at least) :) But with KDE Gear 21.04 there will actually be be a Git Blame plugin. So what does it do for real? Ever wonder why a code line is as it is? Git helps with that. There is the git blame command that provides information about when and who committed a line in a file. Using the commit hash, printed by git blame, it is possible to read the commit message and diff. That is usually a good place to start finding the clues for why it was written in that strange way. Read More

Nifty new feature in Kate for KDE Gear 21.04 With KDE Gear 21.04 there will be a new plugin available for Kate: Git Blame. So what does it do? Every body knows it is a lot of work to go through bug reports and fix the bugs. As we all know lazy developers (that is the good type) do not want to do tedious work and try to automate boring tasks. This is where the git blame plugin comes in. Read More

Soon KDE Gear 21.04 will be out, including Kate Soon KDE Gear 21.04 will be released. This will include the Kate text editor. KDE what? If you wonder: what is KDE Gear? That is the new name for the KDE release service. This had different names in the past, like "KDE Applications" that were misleading, as not all KDE based applications are released together like this. For example neither Krita is part of KDE Gear nor is KDevelop, to just name a few. Read More

Qt (6?) is doomed? In the last days, I read the Qt Interest mailing list and was amazed about the very verbose discussion there about what is all bad with Qt in general and Qt 6. As for any mailing list discussion, that is not representative, but if you just read that, the world looks bleak. A short (personal) digest could read like: Qt 5 => 6 is horrible, the Qt project (and company) doesn't care for their (open source and other) users and the future is doomed for Qt. Read More