Planet 

Looking back at the last month, migrating our Kate homepage over to WordPress was a vast success. The useful content we had on our old Drupal was copied over. The benefit of WordPress is that we now have a nice blog software as well with which we even aggregate some external blogs related to Kate. The new homepage is also more structured by having a list of featured articles showing useful resources, such as links to user or developer documentation. Read More

KDE 4.5 will be released in the next days with the most polished Kate/KWrite and KatePart during the KDE 4.x series. A lot of work went into fixing bugs and cleaning up old code for this release. Many important aspects where redone, just to enumerate a few: encoding detection & handling the text buffer the undo/redo system (thanks Bernhard) search/replace (thanks again Bernhard) handling cursors and ranges improved spell checking (thanks Michel) improved indentation (thanks Milian) speed improvements (Milian too) better JS scripting (Dominik) porting of KDevelop to new interfaces (David Nolden) It will be the most unit-tested release of KatePart ever I guess, but still a long way to go until we have a good test coverage. (we just scratch the surface) Read More

Hello, today i will show you a new plugin for Kate, called KateSQL. As you may have guessed, it brings to Kate the basic features of an SQL client, allowing you to open connections, execute queries, and display result data from SELECT statements or stored procedures. Since this plugin makes an extreme use of the Qt Sql module, most of database drivers are supported.. Said this, let me explain how it works.. Read More

Hello, As I stated in a previous post, the swap file feature for Kate is almost done. Back then, the view differences feature wasn’t ready, but now we have a basic implementation of it. So now, by pressing the “View changes” button, a new KProcess is created, which receives as command line arguments the ‘diff’ program and the two files to be compared. One file is the original file on the disk, and the other one is represented by the recovered data read from the standard input. Then, Kompare launches, and there you can see the differences. But sadly, at the moment you can’t merge the changes or some of them through Kompare, but I’m working on it. All you can do is see the differences and decide whether you want to recover the lost data or not. Close Kompare, and then press the “Recover” button or the “Discard” one, depending on what you want to do.

KDE has three wikis: TechBase, Community and UserBase. The separation has the following meaning according to http://wiki.kde.org: TechBase: The primary place for high quality technical information about KDE targeted at 3rd party developers, ISVs and system administrators. Community: The working area for the KDE community. It provides a place for sharing information within the community and coordinating community teams. UserBase: The home for KDE users and enthusiasts. It provides high quality information for end users on how to use KDE applications. So TechBase is a source of mostly technical information. This includes step-by-step howtos for all sorts of KDE development as well as the feature plans and schedules for KDE releases and so forth. It’s mainly static content. Think of a howto for a Plasma Widget or a howto for building KDE. The content usually is valid for a long time, mostly even for years. For those of you longer in the KDE project, TechBase is the same as our good old developer.kde.org page (and we’ve never put arbitrary content there). The only difference is, that it’s now maintained as wiki. Read More

The Wheel of Time turns… meaning that the Kate Project has quite along history by now. The Kate Project was started back in December 2000, so it’s almost 10 years old. Development sometimes continues with a fast pace; and at other times there is almost no progress for weeks. But all in all, looking back at those 10 years, we can proudly tell you that the project is very much alive. Let’s take a look at the traffic of our mailing list: Read More

As with any new code, during adoption bottlenecks show up. For example the rendering of text lines with many ranges inside was quiet slow. This is now partly addressed by Milian Wolff, thanks a lot. An other bottleneck was the assumption, that it is fast enough to hash the ranges just by their block and iterate over all of them to search the ranges matching a specific line. This does scale well enough for KatePart itself, but KDevelop creates multi-thousand ranges for small documents. To improve this, an internal special mapping was implemented by David Nolden for ranges which don’t span more than one line. For them an efficient line => range mapping is easy and not to costly. Read More

Last year we already discovered that Kate is truly the only holy text editor* (again thanks to rms for making us aware of it)! (and btw, xkcd is totally wrong). And now we even have yet another proof: The holy Kate maintainer and the naked woman! Enjoy :-) Read More

Dominik already blogged about the issues we have in KatePart with the current SmartRange/SmartCursor/Smart* interfaces that were designed during the early KDE 4.0 release. Given that large amounts of the internal implementation are exposed to the outside in the interfaces, there was no feasible way to fix the issues with them. The problem with the not thread-safe behaviour could have been prevented by just stating the plain fact that multi-threaded access to the ranges doesn’t work, even thought there is a mutex in the interface exposed which should be locked to gain this safety. Still the real problems of the unchangable bad implemenation and design choices would have remained. Read More

Hello, As mid-term evaluations have started, I would like to show my current state of GSoC project, because I’ve never found the time to do it. The swap file feature is implemented, except for the view differences feature and few TODOs. Some more testing need to be done, though. Below are some screenshots of how it works. When you start editing in a document, a swap file for the document is created (“.swp.originalFileName”). If Kate crashes and the user didn’t save the changes, the swap file remains on the disk. Read More