Planet 

Since some weeks, the Kate homepage features a way to support Kate and KDE by donating money to the KDE e.V., see this screenshot:

The reason for showing a donation pane might not be obvious, since the KDE project is open source and mostly developed by lots of contributors in their free time. So why do we need money?

2021 Update: Kate's current mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker, a refreshed version of the mascot introduced in this post.

After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5  dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!

Since KDE SC 4.10, Kate ships with the Projects plugin. This plugin provides an automatically generated structured list of files belonging to a project. Currently, in Kate 5, the Projects plugin looks like this:

What’s new in the Project plugin in Kate 5 since some weeks is an auto-loading feature. In 4.x times you needed to create a .kateproject file that was then read by the Projects plugin to populate the listview. This still works in Kate 5, of course. But if a .kateproject file does not exists, you can now still read the file list from the version control system. To this end, auto-loading for the respective version control system needs to be enabled in the settings (enabled by default):

The next major step in Kate’s evolution is close: Kate based on KDE Frameworks 5.

Whereas it already works well enough for me (and others), it would be nice to clear out as many issues as possible before we have our first official KF 5 based release.

Our Bugzilla is full with smaller and larger Kate/KTextEditor (aka KatePart) issues, see:

• Our bugs in the KDE bugtracker
• Our wishes in the KDE bugtracker

Whereas Kate/KTextEditor has people working on it and continue to improve it over time, we don’t have enough people to keep track and care for all our reported bugs/wishs.

The yearly KDE conference Akademy just ended, so it’s time to look at what changed in the holy Kate in the Frameworks 5 land.

KTextEditor Framework

• silent reload of document: Switching a git branch, Kate always pops up a dialog asking whether to reload the document. With this patch, if the document is version controlled by git, the git hash of the file computed and then it’s checked whether the file exists in git. If so, the file is reloaded without asking you. This should be very handy for developers using git! Thanks to Sven Brauch for this idea!
• new highlighting unit testing infrastructure
• several new syntax highlighting files
• cursor down in the last line in the document moves the cursor to the end of the line, same for the cursor up behavior, after just 8 years a bugzilla wish becomes true ;)
• properly load/save the search & replace history
• fix kateversion tags in all our >200 highlighting files, thanks to Martin Walch
• as always: lots of improvements to the vi input mode

Kate Application

• use native dialogs on all platforms, including OS X, Windows
• split view: action to toggle splitter orientation
• the toolbar is by default turned off (see screenshot), resulting in a very cleaned up interface. You can turn it on in the Settings menu.
• new document switcher plugin (see screenshot) through Ctrl+Tab, providing quick access to the most recently used documents (similar to Alt+Tab in kwin), based on KDevelops code
• improvements to the tab bar
• revive, cleanup and improve the text snippet plugin by Sven Brauch
• projects plugin: autoload project even if no .kateproject is found (configurable to not clash with the auto-generated cmake .kateproject file), implemented by Michal Humpula
• the Plasma 5 applet to start a Kate session is back, thanks to the work of Josef Wenninger

A big thanks to the organizers of this year’s Akademy, and a big thanks to all our sponsors and supporting members. The location was amazing and the venue allowed us all to have a very productive week! Looking forward to next year! :-)

Only some days until the yearly Akademy starts.

Its a real great thing to get known to other KDE/Qt contributors and meet old and new friends.

Already amazed, lets hope the airlines don’t go on strike during my travel :=)

See you all there, lets have fun & be productive! Already now thanks to all people that help to organize this cool event and all our sponsors!

Hi,

from today on, the master branch of kate.git is KF5 based.

That means, for the next KDE applications release after 4.14, Kate will use the awesome KF5 stuff!

The KTextEditor framework is already in a good shape and most active KatePart development is since months pure KF5 based.

The same should now be true for Kate itself (and KWrite).

Pâté will need a lot of love, as PyQt5 is there, but PyKDE5/PyKF5 still in the works.

You like KDE software?

You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?

But you can’t help out yourself by coding, translating, bug finding, designing, documenting and whatever?

=> Feel free to fund our Randa Meetings 2014.

Perhaps it feels strange that a free/open source project wants money, but sprints & meetings are not for free, given you need to pay for the accommodations, travel, rooms for hacking, …

Happy news arrived on the kwrite-devel mailing list with this post before Easter ;)

Kate has won the advanced text editor comparison in the Linux Voice magazine – Issue 2, yeah ;)

Nice to see that our work on Kate is awarded.

About Linux Voice: Seems to be some pretty new magazine about Linux & Open Source (Issue 2 says it all) and they promise to give 50% of their profit back to the Free Software community, developers and events. Hope that works out, it is a nice goal.

This is sort of a poll: Please write in the comments below exactly

• one line about what you like on Kate, and
• one line what you want improved.

Please spread the word so we get a lot of feedback – Thanks! :-)