Planet 

After the latest changes in Nokia, I was kind of scared that “Qt Everywhere!” like printed on my nice bathing towel won’t really happen any more, at least not as fast as thought.

Now I got my new phone, Android based, and tried out Necessitas. And I must say, I am impressed. Just downloaded Ministro from the Android Market (yes, just like that, no rooting, no hacking, nothing) and the hello world demo and it runs :P

Thanks to the massive work of sysadmin and others (like Ian Monroe), kdelibs and kdebase are now converted to Git.

In parallel, the move of all kate related code to the kate.git was done and announced. Kate Part / App + KWrite reside now in kate.git on git.kde.org and this is the central place for kate development, like it was already before, but now without the shadow-copies in three other repositories.

As Dominik already points out in his blog, Kate has made nice progress for KDE 4.6.

Some of the latest fixes, like for some nasty search bug didn’t make it in RC1, btw., I was too lame with Git -> SVN syncs.
Anyway, I have now synced and backported to KDE 4.6 branch all pending fixes.

For the next KDE SC release 4.7 (here you go, I wrote SC :)), I hope this syncing will no longer be necessary.
At least Kate app + part + KWrite should then be only in the kate.git.
I can live with ktexteditor remaining in kdelibs, if removing that and still keeping BC and SC would be too much work. But part and app are at most runtime dependencies anyway.

Some days ago KDE 4.6 was branched. So what will Kate in KDE 4.6 bring?

• The new tree view as “Documents” sidebar completely replaces the old file list. It supports the simple list mode as well as a pseudo-intelligent tree view to group files. The “Documents” tab is now implemented as plugin (always loaded), meaning that it brought a code cleanup as well. We hope you like it! :)
• Swap file support, meaning that you can recover all your unsaved data for local files on the next Kate startup.
• Ability to always load plugins.
• New SQL Query plugin. The day we blogged about it had the most visits in the entire kate-editor.org history. So it seems the the SQL plugin is a really nice addon for web developers! :)
• New GNU Debugger (GDB) Plugin!
• New Highlight Selected Text Plugin.
• Ability to add scripts to the menu and bind shortcuts.
• Kate got a new homepage on http://www.kate-editor.org featuring WordPress.
• Lots of bugs fixed since the KDE 4.5.0 release.
• SmartCursors and SmartRanges are gone, resulting in more stable and clean code. MovingCursors and MovingRanges replace the old classes and work reliable. For instance, KDevelop is already ported leading to less crashes.
• Christoph found the emails of the early days of Kate again. A funny read! :)
• Daily unit test runs. We have more and more unit tests, securing the correct behavior of e.g. search&replace, the text buffer, encoding detection or indenters.
• Kate development mostly moved to KDE’s git infrastructure, resulting in very easy build instructions.
• The default settings of a session are now stored in the katerc file again, rendering the default.katesession obsolete. This means you will have to configure your default session again (sorry!). On the other hand, this fixed quite some bugs with regard to the session handling.

Credit where credit is due!

Goodbye to Gitorious, welcome to git.kde.org.

You can find the Kate project here.
The “Get It!” page on the homepage is updated, too.
Push access is still restricted, but that will not last for ever ;)

Thanks to the sysadmin team of KDE, thanks guys, for all the work you put into the new infrastructure (and to help me with my faults ;)
And thanks to Gitorious, it was a nice time there, and I learned to appreciate Git, like many Kate developers (some appreciated it even before).

Kate has a new plugin called “Highlight Selection”. Since it is a KTextEditor plugin, it is available for all apps using KatePart (e.g.: Kile, Kate, KWrite, KDevelop etc). What does it do? If you select a whole word, all occurrences of this word are highlighted as well:

Hi! It’s me again. Got some exciting news.

The file tree is now the default (and only) document list/view widget. It actually took me by surprise. After I got the list mode and other features implemented, the old document list was unceremoniously ripped out, and extensions were added to allow kate to always load a given plugin, and give its settings tab a little more prominence.

Since then however I’ve fixed a few issues regarding the settings in the plugin. The file tree settings tab now sets the plugins global settings, and will clear out the setting overrides for the current session so they will get pulled from the global settings. And I just finished up adding back the “Go” menu, and the “next” and “prev” document shortcuts.