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My first Akademy was the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced. I remember I was quite unsure a month ago, wheter to come or not, but finally decided and booked my flight and hotel. In my first day, I was very shy and didn’t know what to do, but people came and talked to me and everything got better. The talks had very interesting topics and the speakers did their job professionally. I also want to congratulate the organization team, for making everything happen as scheduled. Read More

kate-editor.org now contains all articles from the old page still applicable to Kate in KDE 4 and in addition all blog entries of Dominik which are Kate centric. Beside that it will aggregate the blog entries of Milian for Kate ;) Still, a lot of work is needed. We already got an offer for help to beautify the page by a web designer, still content writers are missing. You have a nice short post about how to use Kate best? You have some howto? Just contact us or me in private. We can either give you an account on the page or just add your content if you like that more. Read More

After some years of no real updates, beside the brave work of Dominik, a new kate-editor.org is launched. It will be used to aggregate the blogs of the Kate developers and provide information about current development in Kate/KWrite/KatePart and guides for users. Hope more people join the effort to once again provide a constant stream of up-to-date information.

Finally, I came around to implement scripted actions for Kate in KDE SC 4.6. Let’s take a look at how this works. When Kate starts, it searches for $KDEDIRS/share/apps/katepart/script/ for *.js files. As example, let’s take a look at utils.js there: /* kate-script * author: Dominik Haumann Haumann * license: LGPL * revision: 3 * kate-version: 3.4 * type: commands * functions: moveLinesDown */ function moveLinesDown() { var fromLine = -1; var toLine = -1; var selectionRange = view.selection(); if (selectionRange.isValid() && selectionRange.end.line < document.lines() - 1) { toLine = selectionRange.start.line; fromLine = selectionRange.end.line + 1; } else if (view.cursorPosition().line < document.lines() - 1) { toLine = view.cursorPosition().line; fromLine = toLine + 1; } if (fromLine != -1 && toLine != -1) { var text = document.line(fromLine); document.editBegin(); document.removeLine(fromLine); document.insertLine(toLine, text); document.editEnd(); } } function action(cmd) { var a = new Object(); if (cmd == "moveLinesDown") { a.text = i18n("Move Lines Down"); a.icon = ""; a.category = ""; a.interactive = false; a.shortcut = ""; } return a; } function help(cmd) { if (cmd == "moveLinesDown") { return i18n("Move selected lines down."); } } What happens is the following: Read More

As always, the KDE conference has its funny sides, as you can see on the photo: 4 Kate developers shaping the future of the (as you all know) most awesome application: Kate :-)

Back in February, I blogged about Kate’s move to gitorious. The main reason for this move was to make building Kate as easy as possible. If you want to build Kate as part of KDE, (as of now) you have to compile kdesupport, phonon, dbusmenu-qt, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase for kwrite and kdesdk for the kate application. Getting all this done is a huge effort, especially if you are new to KDE development (I very well remember my own times spending weeks to get everything going. Be aware of new contributors might now close to nothing about KDE and all the dependencies!). As getting new contributors is essential for keeping a project alive, the barrier to get involved should be as low as possible. And exactly this was achieved by moving all pieces to one place (this was gitorious for us). Building Kate is so simple right now that we can even make bug reporters build Kate out of the box. This helps a lot, and even results in patches from time to time. We also got quite some merge requests. There were several voices at that time that considered moving “away from KDE” was very bad. However, this is not the case, as Christoph is synchronizing all the changes in KDE’s subversion and gitorious almost every day. This is certainly not optimal, but looking back at the last months, we can say it was worth it. KDE is moving to git.kde.org in the near future. This also raises the discussion about how KDE’s source code will be organized. Speaking for Kate, we certainly want to have all of Kate’s code in one place, just as it is now with gitorious, no matter what :) I hope we can find a solution the KDE community can live with. To be discussed, maybe in Tampere in two weeks? :) Read More

Let’s have a quick look at how to debug Kate and KWrite with Qt Creator. First, make sure you meet the requirements: build Kate according to this tutorial install Qt-Creator (in my case this is version 2.0.0) Setup the Kate project Qt-Creator once like this start Qt-Creator like this (important to get all environment variables right): ~/kde/run.sh qtcreator invoke File > Open File or Project and choose ~/kde/kate/CMakeLists.txt Build Location: choose ~/kde/build Run CMake arguments: type ../kate -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/kde/usr click the button “Run CMake” and then “Finish” Start debugging like this Read More

We still have a crash in Kate’s code folding code; no one was able to find a proper fix, yet. So if you want to get your hands dirty, just build Kate, find a fix and be the hero of all Kate developers :) Update: Fixed by Stefan Schenk in this commit for KDE 4.5. Awesome! :)

SmartCursors and SmartRanges in KDE 4.0 – KDE 4.4 Since KDE 4.0 the KTextEditor interfaces have so called SmartCursors and SmartRanges. A SmartCursor is a text cursor (i.e. a line/column tuple) , which is bound to a text document. When editing the text document, the cursor is automatically moved such that it maintains its position. You need this for the displayed text cursor in a view for instance. If you type text, the cursor automatically moves. A SmartRange consists of two SmartCursors: start and end. We use that for instance for the text selection or the inline spell checking, or KDevelop uses it to add arbitrary highlighting to parsed C/C++ code. Again, if you modify text in the document, the text range automatically moves, expands or shrinks. Read More

A while ago I’ve blogged about the Kate’s most powerful plugins: the XML completion plugin. Thanks to Tomáš Trnka this plugin is back alive with all its features since today and compiled by default in trunk: It will be included in KDE 4.5. Yay! :) And if you need it already now for KDE 4.4, you can build Kate yourself very easily according to this howto, without touching your global KDE installation (probably interesting for KDE documentation writers!). Have fun! Read More