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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.

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:

Kate and Okular 20.04 are now available in the store!

I hope this update solves some issues of the 19.12 versions available before.

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 - Advanced Text Editor - 4,465 acquisitions

• Okular - More than a reader - 4,399 acquisitions

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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 - Advanced Text Editor - 5,031 acquisitions

• Okular - More than a reader - 4,419 acquisitions

• Filelight - Disk Usage Visualizer - 839 acquisitions

• Kile - A user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor - 600 acquisitions

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Starting with the upcoming 20.04 release (or current master branch builds), Kate allows the user to turn on some telemetry submission. This is a purely opt-in approach. We will not submit any data if you not actively enable this feature!

Like Plasma we use the KUserFeedback framework for this task.

For details about how we handle the data, refer to KDE’s Applications Privacy Policy and specifically the Telemetry Policy.

The Elisa music player is now in the Windows Store, too!

It is the sixth application published there with the KDE e.V. account.

And here are our current number of acquisitions (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications:

• Kate - Advanced Text Editor - 23,524 acquisitions

• Okular - More than a reader - 16,154 acquisitions

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Tyson Tan provided now a Breeze variant of the new Kate icon, too.

This is now in the master branch of the breeze-icons repository.

I hope other icon themes will update their Kate icon variants to match our new style, too.

I first tried to enforce the use of the new icon by renaming it, but I got reminded this is too harsh and I should give the icon theme authors a chance to update them in their own pace.

For years, Kate had a very generic icon. Unlike most other editors, that have very distinctive ones, we went with an icon that represented the use case of the program but provided no branding.

In 2014, we tried to improve our branding by introducing a mascot - Kate the Woodpecker. Thought we used that in some places, like on the web site and in the about dialog, overall, the only thing most people did see was the generic icon (that even differs a lot between different icon themes).

Initial release with 19.12.0

The LSP client plugin for Kate made it into the 19.12 release.

As this is the first official release of this plugin, it still has a lot of rough edges.

I use it at the office and it behaves well enough for my daily work on C/C++ and OCaml code.

Kate is now in the Windows Store since September, see our initial post.

It was the second application published there with the KDE e.V. account.

One might argue that it is no good thing for an open-source project to promote the use of closed-source operating systems like Windows.

On the other side, a lot of people are stuck on Windows and I think it is a good thing to provide them with open-source software. If people start to use more and more open-source user-space software, they will perhaps be able to switch over to some fully open-source operating system in the future.