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!

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.

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.

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

A lot of stuff happened for Kate and it's foundation KTextEditor & KSyntaxHighlighting in January 2021 ;)

I will just briefly summarize what is going one feature wise.

Quick Open

Already two weeks ago I pointed out the improvements to our Quick Open dialog.

It not only got some nice visual refresh but a much better fuzzy matching algorithm.

After my summary of Kate improvements in 2020, it is my pleasure to show a first improvement coming in 2021.

Quick Open?

Kate has since years a feature called "quick open". You reach it via the button at the right of the tabs or the default shortcut "Ctrl-Alt-O". Quick open will provide a list of the current open documents (and in addition files of the current/all active projects) for quick navigation between them. Other editors call this often "Go to file..." or similar.

2020 was for sure no good year for most people around the world. A lot of us are affected directly or indirectly by the currently still raging COVID-19 pandemic. Let's hope that 2021 will bring better fortune at least in this aspect.

Still, good stuff happened in 2020, too, not all was bleak. I read already some wrap ups of 2020 from others like Nate and Aleix. A lot stuff happened inside the KDE community this year.

The end of 2020 is nigh, 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 report in August we have a newcomer: LabPlot.

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:

Kate just turned 20 today!

As announced before, Kate turned twenty today.

When did it start?

Here again my initial request to the KWrite maintainer about my work on a 'MDI KWrite' later called Kate (sorry, German & spelling mistakes):

From: Cullmann Christoph <crossfire@babylon2k.de>
To: digisnap@cs.tu-berlin.de
Subject: KWrite - Verbesserungsvorschläge
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 18:38:42 +0100
Hallo
Ich benutze KWrite regelmässig um Quellcode zu bearbeiten und das
Syntaxhighlighting ist sehr praktisch.
Es wäre jedoch schön wenn KWrite eine MDI-Oberfläche hätte.
Ich baue gerade eine und falls jemand Interesse hat können sie sich ja melden.
Danke und Tschö
Christoph Cullmann</pr

                
                
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Noise inside the terminal?

I more or less always start my Kate session inside a terminal, to let the project plugin auto-load the right one for the current working directory.

What I ignored for a long time is the noise this produces inside the terminal.

If you launch Kate or KWrite, you will often get stuff like (even for release builds):

kf.sonnet.core: Unable to find any suggestion for "dummy to trigger identify"
kf.kio.core: We got some errors while running testparm "Weak crypto is allowed\nERROR: Invalid idmap range for domain *!"
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