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Hey all!

Just wanted to give you a little rundown on Snippets in Kate 4.4 (via the snippets_tng plugin) and KDevelop Beta 8 (soon to be released).

Note: The Kate plugin was written by Jowenn and introduced me to all these nice features. For KDevelop I wrote a somewhat simpler yet imo better implementation. We will try to get the best of both worlds into KDE 4.5. Stay tuned!

Hey all!

Just wanted to give you a little rundown on Snippets in Kate 4.4 (via the snippets_tng plugin) and KDevelop Beta 8 (soon to be released).

Note: The Kate plugin was written by Jowenn and introduced me to all these nice features. For KDevelop I wrote a somewhat simpler yet imo better implementation. We will try to get the best of both worlds into KDE 4.5. Stay tuned!

Phew, I just finished some last-minute backports to the KDE 4.3.5 branch. Lets hope the bug fixes I and pletourn did are as good as they look. Expect a much more stable Kate for 4.3.5 & 4.4! We managed to fix two bugs which are potentially the cause for dozens of bug reports, all seemingly random. Lets see whether our fixes hold up to our hopes!

Other than that: You should look forward to Kate scripting (with JavaScript) in 4.4. It’s dead simple but actually useful. In the utils.js file we ship with Kate there are now the following tools (all operate on the selection or - if none exists - on the whole document):

Phew, I just finished some last-minute backports to the KDE 4.3.5 branch. Lets hope the bug fixes I and pletourn did are as good as they look. Expect a much more stable Kate for 4.3.5 & 4.4! We managed to fix two bugs which are potentially the cause for dozens of bug reports, all seemingly random. Lets see whether our fixes hold up to our hopes!

Other than that: You should look forward to Kate scripting (with JavaScript) in 4.4. It’s dead simple but actually useful. In the utils.js file we ship with Kate there are now the following tools (all operate on the selection or - if none exists - on the whole document):

In KDE3 Kate had a plugin called “XML Completion Plugin”. It was able to list XML elements, attributes and attribute values and entities in a completion popup menu depending on the currently active DTD. For instance, it was able to complete all your KDE/docbook tags and, thus, was one of the best tools for writing KDE documentation.

Unfortunately, this plugin has not been ported to KDE4, yet. So this is a request for developers: Please someone pick it up and make it available for Kate in KDE4.

Well, I have to admit: I didn’t spent much time developing the PHP plugin for KDevelop these past weeks. Instead I hacked on Kate:

HighlightInterface

I added another Kate interface, this time to access some of the highlighting information:

• what’s the Attribute for a given default style right now? Default styles are those known from syntax files, e.g. dsKeyword, dsFunction,…
• what are used Attributes in a given line and what range do they occupy?
• what modes do we embed? E.g. PHP embeds HTML, JavaScript, CSS, …
• what mode is used at a given Cursor position?

This made it possible to port the “Export to HTML” action to a real plugin. If you come up with other output formats I might add them, I wondered about LaTeX support… might do this at some point.

Well, I have to admit: I didn’t spent much time developing the PHP plugin for KDevelop these past weeks. Instead I hacked on Kate:

HighlightInterface

I added another Kate interface, this time to access some of the highlighting information:

• what’s the Attribute for a given default style right now? Default styles are those known from syntax files, e.g. dsKeyword, dsFunction,…
• what are used Attributes in a given line and what range do they occupy?
• what modes do we embed? E.g. PHP embeds HTML, JavaScript, CSS, …
• what mode is used at a given Cursor position?

This made it possible to port the “Export to HTML” action to a real plugin. If you come up with other output formats I might add them, I wondered about LaTeX support… might do this at some point.

Hey everybody!

If you are a KDevelop and/or Kate/Kwrite developer and do not read the mailing lists: There’s a hack sprint coming up in Berlin in 2010. I think there’ve been enough sprints in Berlin already so that you know it’s a great city for such an event. Though this time it won’t be at KDAB or Nokia offices, but at the Physics Faculty of the FU-Berlin. Since I (currently) work there as an IT admin, it was my first choice and worked out. I hope it will be a good location for the meeting. If you want to attend, vote on doodle:

In my last blog I explained Kate’s scripting features in KDE 4.4. To better understand how scripting can be used let’s look at some use cases.

• join lines: This feature request wants the action “join lines” to not join different paragraphs, i.e. not remove empty lines. We have not implemented this wish, as there are probably users who prefer the current behaviour. This request can be fixed by writing a small script that joins the lines according to the user’s wishes.
• reformat paragraph: An intelligent reformatter for paragraphs. Should be rather straight forward to implement.
• XML tools: In KDE3, Kate once had a xmltools plugin. Unfortunately noone ported it to KDE4. The plugin provided lots of very useful features for xml editing. For example, you could select text and then wrap it with xml elements, e.g. “text” would become “textRead More

As mentioned in one of my last blogs, there has been quite some work for JavaScript scripting support in trunk recently. So what will Kate 3.4 (KDE 4.4) will bring? This is explained in detail in the sections:

• Indentation Scripting
• Command Line Scripting
• Some Remarks

The scripting allows to extend Kate with lots of little helper functions. All users can add scripts as they wish. The documentation here is copied from the official Kate handbook. So instead of using this blog as reference, please use the handbook later for an up-to-date version. To script something useful, you’ll need to know the scripting API. All the available functions are documented in the section Scripting API in the handbook as well. Enough said, here we go: