Planet 

Kate Part gained 17 new default styles in addition to the existing 14 default styles. These changes are available for Kate based on the KDE frameworks 5 initiative and currently live in ktexteditor.git module.

Default Styles are predefined font and color styles that are used by Kate Part’s syntax highlighting. For instance, Kate Part always had a default style for comments. Therewith, the comments in all syntax highlighting files look the same (by default, a gray color). Or keywords are by default always bold and black.

In KDE SC 4.8, Kate was extended by the line modification indicators. These indicators show you what lines currently contain unsaved data, but also lines that were once changed but now are saved to disk:

With Kate in KDE 4.13, we have two new actions in the Edit menu:

I am the original author of the Lumen KTextEditor plugin and I am happy to announce, I just committed it to the Kate repository for KDE 4.13!

Lumen is just the name for a plugin providing code-completion for the D programming language in KTextEditor/Kate and KDevelop. But Lumen is just a connection between the editor and the D Completion Daemon (a server providing all the information) called  DCD. The plugin currently supports all major features of the completion server: feeding the server with import files, displaying documentation and several types of completion:

Saturday most Kate developers will depart, therefore now the most work has been finalized (or at least brought to some intermediate state that works OK).

Below, the mandatory screenshot, Kate started without any configuration set in the framework branch, new and shiny:

Find the differences :P

And one screenshot with some files open:

After the first initial status bar integration into the KatePart, we thought a bit more about what users might expect. Looking at the competition, one common feature is to allow quick-switching the indentation settings.

Joseph gave that a try and we now have an even better version available in the KF5 KTextEditor framework.

Mandatory screenshot (KWrite, Kate or other applications using it will look the same), updated version after feedback below:(Update: Using now again non-bold + Line/Column swapped with status)

Just started to introduce a default status bar to KatePart.

Instead of  forcing all applications to implement an own one with varying quality and features, it provides a default status bar that is an improved variant of the status bar of the Kate application. Now Kate and KWrite have exactly the same features there ;)

If the host application doesn’t want that, the KTextEditor interface allows to deactivate it completely.

Here we sit, in Barcelona, hacking away at KTextEditor & Kate.
During the first 2 days, we already got some stuff done, like cleaning up KTextEditor interfaces and port more parts to KF5 (like ctags plugin, sql plugin, …).

More and more, KTextEditor & Kate get into a usable state for frameworks ;)
It is really good to have some free days in a nice location to focus on that goal!

I thought I’d share a very interesting read about how to wrap the lua C bindings with C++11 variadic templates: part 1, part 2, part 3.

These type of cool articles pop up from time to time on reddit/r/cpp, so if you are interested in C++ topics, this is definitely worth to follow.

This is a follow-up to Aaron’s blog Frameworks 5: Timing is everything, put into the perspective of Kate and the KTextEditor interfaces. In short, Aaron suggests application developers the following:

When Frameworks 5 has a firm release schedule, then it makes sense to start coordinating application releases targets with that and syncing up development cycles.

I agree with this entirely, provided it’s really about applications. In the context of Kate, this is not the case, since the term ‘Kate’ usually also refers to the ‘KTextEditor’ interfaces along with its implementation ‘Kate Part’.