Just in case someone is interested: two days ago a very good article about cmake popped up, called It’s Time to do CMake Right. There also is a discussion about it on reddit/r/cpp. happy reading :)

After a long time of constant distraction by my daily work, I finally found again a bit time to take care of KTextEditor/Kate/… issues. One thing that really started to be an itch I wanted to scratch is some rendering fault that occur with ‘special’ font sizes. Given I wanted to do again a bit work on the macOS port, I was really annoyed that on my screen the only application with text rendering issues was “my” one :/ Read More

A central place to track KDE development is the kde-commits@kde.org mailing list. To this mailing list, all code changes are sent, containing the log message as well as the diff that quickly shows what really changed. In the early days of KDE development, the changes were maintained by the CVS version control system. Later, this was changed to subversion. Nowadays, KDE mostly uses git, but some svn modules are still around. Read More

The KTextEditor Framework uses the syntax highlighting files provided by the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework since the KDE Frameworks release 5.28. The KSyntaxHighlighting Framework implements Kate’s highlighting system and meanwhile is used in quite some applications (e.g. LabPlot, KDE PIM). What is quite nice is that the KSyntaxHighlighting framework is nicely unit tested. And while we do not have tests for all highlighting files, we still provide some quality assurance through a compile time checker. Read More

Recently, the KSyntaxHighlighting framework was added to the KDE Frameworks 5.29 release. And starting with KDE Frameworks 5.29, KTextEditor depends on KSyntaxHighlighting. This also means that KTextEditor now queries KSyntaxHighlighting for available xml highlighting files. As such, the location for syntax highlighting files changed from $HOME/.local/share/katepart5/syntax to $HOME/.local/share/org.kde.syntax-highlighting/syntax So if you want to add your own syntax highlighting files to Kate/KDevelop, then you have to use the new location. By the way, in former times, all syntax highlighting files were located somewhere in /usr/share/. Read More

Hi, in the recent months, I didn’t find much time to spend on Kate/KTextEditor development. But at least I was now able to spend a bit more time on OpenSource & Qt things even during work time in our company. Normally I am stuck there with low level binary or source analysis work. For our products, we were in the need of some online help. As our documentation is delivered as PDFs generated by the tools of the TeX Live distro, a natural idea was to use some PDF viewer and integrate it more tightly in our software than just “open the manual at page 1”. Read More

Today, KDE Frameworks 5.28 was released with the brand new KSyntaxHighlighting framework. The announcement says: New framework: syntax-highlighting Syntax highlighting engine for Kate syntax definitions This is a stand-alone implementation of the Kate syntax highlighting engine. It’s meant as a building block for text editors as well as for simple highlighted text rendering (e.g. as HTML), supporting both integration with a custom editor as well as a ready-to-use QSyntaxHighlighter sub-class. This year, on March 31st, KDE’s advanced text editor Kate had its 15th birthday. Read More

In the past, KTextEditor notified the user about externally modified files with a modal dialog. Many users were annoyed by this behavior. Starting with KDE Frameworks 5.27, KTextEditor will show an embedded widget for external changes, see:

Dominik and me got the Akademy 2016 Award for our work on Kate and KTextEditor. I want to pass that on to all other contributors of both the application and the framework: You all rock and people seem to appreciate our work! Lets keep on improving our stuff and providing people with a very usable editor and editor component for various use cases.