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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. 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. 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

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. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

Kate, KTextEditor and Co. did get a nice stream of updates in the first two weeks of February 2021. I will just pick a few things I really liked, if you want to have a full overview, you can go through the list of all merged patches. Even more multi-threading in search in files After the initial parallelization of the actual search in files as described here, Kåre came up with the idea to parallelize the creation of the file list we use for the search, too. Read More

KDE's developer experience evolution Kate (and KDE) is always in need of more contributors. Over the years we tried to make the development experience more pleasant and move to tools that are more widely adopted by developers around the world. We traveled from ancient CVS repositories over to Subversion and since years are up and running on Git. We moved our code hosting to a more beginner friendly GitLab instance in the last year, too. Read More

Kate has since years a very nifty search in files plugin. It allows to do multi-file searches and replacements. Together with the projects plugin, I use this plugin daily, it is great! But, whereas it was very useful already since the first release and got polished a lot in the last years, it is by far not the fastest file search out there. Let's be honest: for example Visual Studio Code is fast, we are slow, that is bad :=P Read More