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20 years...

As described here Kate will soon be twenty.

My mail to the former KWrite maintainer dates back to "Thu, 14 Dec 2000 18:38:42 +0100", thought I think I started earlier with actually hacking on that MDI KWrite variant.

But just to have some official date, let's say Kate was born at 14th December 2000, in a bit over one month Kate will turn officially twenty ;=)

One year in the store

Kate is now in the Windows Store since a bit over one year, our initial submission went online on September 12, 2019.

The submitted installers are always taken 1:1 from our very lovely Binary Factory. They just get some test drive if they behave well and then are submitted like described here with the KDE e.V. account.

Therefore the most work was done by all the people that created and keep the Craft tooling & Binary Factory working! Thanks a lot to our awesome system administrators, Hannah and all other involved people ;=)

Thanks to the feedback & patches provided by others, I found a bit more motivation to take a look at the small things that seems to be odd in KTextEditor.

Interesting enough, if you once notice a small detail (like a dead pixel on your display you suddenly find after years of use), it really sticks out like a sore thumb...

Here two small things that caught my interest this week.

Color theme? What?

The KSyntaxHighlighting framework provides support for color themes.

These color themes specify all colors (text/background/selection/...) and font style roles (italic/bold/...) that are used for the highlighting. The definition happens in some easy to understand JSON file format.

Starting with the upcoming KDE Frameworks 5.75 release, all KTextEditor framework based application will support these color themes for their embedded editors.

This includes Kate & KWrite, but naturally a lot more, like for example KDevelop, Kile and RKWard.

A tab bar, that's easy, isn't it?

You would think so... But this topic seems like an everlasting journey ;=) Or running in circles...

A bit of history

The evil past without tabbing (long long ago, far far away...)

Kate did a long time not have tabbing. My initial design was a MDI editor with a list/treeview for the file selection.

We had splitting very soon and some when in-between we had tabs around the split areas (like in good old Konqueror). But we had no tabs for documents. The tabbing for the split views was removed again later, as close to nobody understood or even found it ;)

Frameworks 5.75 => KSyntaxHighlighting Themes

Last week I reported about the currently done changes to the color themes in KTextEditor (Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/...). As this was just the half finished job, I felt somehow motivated to work on the remaining parts.

I had more time this week to work on it than thought and finalized the transition from the old "schema" stuff we had to pure use of KSyntaxHighlighting themes. This is a rather large change, I guess one of the largest code changes I did in KTextEditor in the last years beside the porting of the highlighting itself to KSyntaxHighlighting. This change touches a lot stuff that is more than one decade old.

Color Themes aka "Schemas"

KTextEditor (and therefore Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/...) has a concept of color themes since more than one decade.

In the KTextEditor UI this is called a "Schema" at the moment. (Don't ask me why it wasn't called color theme or something like this, seems I wasn't that clever at choosing names in the past.)

The user can configure the colors inside the settings and the stuff is saved in some very ancient way (nice string lists of hand-crafted text output of colors/bools/...) inside KConfig INI files. There is some import/export of this stuff based on KConfig INI files, too.

In the KSyntaxHighlighting framework we use small example files for the individual languages as regression tests. See the current collection here.

We will create HTML output and two internal formats to check highlighting attributes & folding regions. These results are then diffed with version controlled reference files.

At the moment we only check the default light theme for the HTML output, but I intend to extend this to check the dark theme, too. This will e.g. make it easier to spot problematic hard coded colors that are not readable in one of both variants.

Looking around the internet a bit for Kate related stuff, I stumbled over the current incarnation of the Haskell re-implementation of KSyntaxHighlighting: skylighting. They reuse the highlighting definitions we provide and convert them to some Haskell data structures to do the highlighting. pandoc uses this to provide highlighting for included code snippets.

Out of curiosity I wanted to know how up-to-date they are in respect to the files we keep in our repository, but interesting enough their repository actually contained some files we didn't have at all.

Here are the number of acquisitions for the last 30 days (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications:

• Okular - More than a reader - 4,421 acquisitions

• Kate - Advanced Text Editor - 3,641 acquisitions

• Filelight - Disk Usage Visualizer - 1,390 acquisitions

• Kile - A user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor - 530 acquisitions

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