Posts 

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. Read More

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. Read More

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). Read More

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. Read More

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/. Read More

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. Read More

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. Read More

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 KStars - Astronomy Software - 287 acquisitions Elisa - Modern Music Player - 141 acquisitions Read More

Starting with the 20.04 release, Kate allows the user to turn on some telemetry submission. This is a purely opt-in approach. We do not submit any data if you not actively enable this feature! For details about the introduction of this feature, see this post. After some months of having this out in the wild, I think it is time to show up with the first data we got. Submission numbers First, how many submission do we get? Read More

KDE switched over to a self-hosted GitLab instance this year: invent.kde.org. Many thanks again to our system administrators and all other contributors to this large effort! This means, e.g. Kate, KTextEditor and KSyntaxHighlighting are now using the GitLab workflow for all contributions. Whereas there are still some old review requests and tasks on phabricator.kde.org, all new contributions should arrive as merge requests on invent.kde.org. For the three projects I take care of, you can see what already arrived and is now under discussion or already merged here: Read More