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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The State on X11/Wayland (more or less since a few years)

On the most Unices that use X11/Wayland and therefore are capable of running the full Plasma Desktop the state of light & dark themes and the accompanied icon themes is really good for KDE Frameworks based application.

Just take a look at these two screenshots of a light and dark mode Kate running on GNU Linux/X11 & Plasma Desktop.

Short history of the 'KDELIBS' coding style

Once upon a time, in the monolithic KDELIBS world, we had some document describing the KDELIBS coding style.

Over the years, that evolved a bit and ended up here as Frameworks Coding Style.

As noted there, it is more or less the same stuff Qt does style wise.

How was that coding style handled in practice?

Actually, this styling was really never enforced on a global scale.

Like in January 2021, a lot of stuff happened for Kate in February 2021, too. I will skip the stuff that I already reported on Valentine's Day. The web site for example has still a new design and some people are still working behind the scenes to improve it!

Let's take a look at which cool new stuff you can expect to have in the 21.04 release of Kate. If you are adventurous: build the current development version yourself and try the stuff today. Feedback & patches welcome!