Planet 

During our long bug hunting and fixing sprint I came along some nasty BiDi or Unicode related bugs.

I and most others in the Kate team are not really able to fix such issues :( We lack both the knowledge of the underlying techniques and are not able to write/read any language that really uses complex unicode chars or BiDi text.

Therefore: If you know Qt and you want to help out with fixing BiDi/Unicode related bugs, please provide patches for them in the KDE Bugzilla!

Update (2014-10-18): Auto-Loading Projects in Kate 5

Introducing the Projects Plugin for KDE SC 4.10

The basic idea of the Projects plugin is to have a structured list of files belonging to the  project with the following properties:

1. provide a structured view of the files
2. make it easy and very fast to open and switch projects
3. support search & replace for a project
4. provide simple auto completion
5. make it simple to quickly open files in the project
6. support for building the project

We’re going to address all these points now.

Currently we are at the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Vienna. Christoph and me took the time to look a bit around in the net for Kate, and more or less accidently stumbled over quite a lot of extensions by our users. Here are some examples:

• script to jump to next/previous paragraph
• several really good highlighting files, e.g. for C++11
• several Kate plugins written in Python
• many more python plugins for Kate, even officially listed in the Python index
• there is more, I won’t list it all :)

Kate has just about 20 plugins written in C++. And, ironically, there are more plugins for Kate written in python. This is totally awesome, but still, the Kate developers didn’t even know about it ?¿? :-o

Another quick update: Jowenn just implemented a decent tool tip that displays the current view line while scrolling, a wish from 9 years ago. Mandatory screenshot (pimped with my “awesome” Gimp skills):

Up to KDE 4.9, Kate Part had support to remove trailing spaces in two ways:

1. Remove trailing spaces while editing
2. Remove trailing spaces on save

The reasoning behind removing trailing spaces while editing is that when working on a document, we want to keep our own changes clean of trailing spaces. This way, we can for instance provide patches that are not cluttered with whitespace changes, and we just change lines that we really want to change.

KDE has all these little nifty features, and – guess what – Kate has them, too. Here, we’ll have a look at how to delete a file with Kate. We’ll start with opening the file we want to delete. Example:

Next, we open the menu File > Open With and choose Other… as follows:

Recently I’ve blogged about the usage of KMessageWidget in the data recovery process in Kate Part. Finally, we decided to stick with KMessageWidget, since it is a standard kdelibs widget, used by a lot of KDE applications. Besides, it is visually appealing and attracts the user’s attention. In KDE SC 4.10, it will look like this:

Now if you recover the data, it may happen that the swap file is broken, e.g. because it was accidently manipulated for whatever reason. Then you get notified like this:

Its nice to be here in Vienna with all the other hackers ;)
Most have already arrived and are busy fixing issues in Kate & KDevelop, some more will arrive tomorrow.

Already got bit work done on existing bugs, one bug was really nasty: a nearly 8 year old typo by myself messing around with highlighting in combination with line continuation.

But a guy did a really perfect bug report: Bug 300009
He wrote even a example highlighting file + test to trigger the issue, with that help, the fix was trivial to do, after I got time to read the bug ;)

In some days our nice sprint will start, more information can be found on KDE Sprints.

I am very happy that Joseph Wenninger organizes this event and the KDE e.V. aided with additional sponsorship! Sprints are a real important thing for all KDE projects and it is nice to see that thanks to the help of the community our e.V. is able to sponsor a lot of such events.

After some days of more hacking on the plugin, there current state is already nice for my daily use.

A simple file like

{
     "name": "Kate"
   , "files": [ { "git": 1 } ]
}

defines already the complete project for the kate.git.

If you open any file with Kate inside your local kate.git clone (and the project plugin from master branch is loaded), Kate will auto-open the project and highlight the file you just opened there in the tree. No need to think about opening some project in the menu, just open the file you want to start working at and start. The project plugin won’t get into your way or require additional steps.