Planet 

Since the KDE SC 4.12 release a month ago, it’s about time to look at the changes of Kate in 4.12:

• Vi input mode: complete macro support
• Heavily improved vi input mode
• Multi-column text editing (thanks to Andrey Matveyakin)
• MiniMap: align to the top (instead of vertically centered)
• Projects plugin: modified files now show a modified icon
• Improved C++/Boost Style indenter
• in total, 21 issues (including wishes and bugs) were fixed

What comes next?

Kate will get more polishing in the next 4.x releases, for instance, in KDE SC 4.13 Kate optionally supports animated bracket matching.

Hi,

a long time ago, the license of most parts of Kate/KWrite/KatePart/KTextEditor was LGPLv2+ (in the old time, where it was named KWritePart/Kant/…, the original KWrite had that license originally, at least all parts of the component of it).

Then, we changed that to be LGPLv2 (only).

It seems, that was a poor choice, as we now run in v2 vs. v3 vs. any later version problems.

In KDE 4, you can open a new window for Kate via “View -> New Window”.

This won’t start a new application instance but just add an other Kate main window to the current instance (which shows the same documents & session & projects).

This is kind of complex to handle internally and we think about dropping that behavior and instead launching just an other Kate application instance if you trigger that menu action.

Just a quick update on the frameworks 5 port: KTextEditor,  Kate Part and KWrite build and run. Kate is not yet ported and does not compile. These changes were already committed:

• made KTE::Cursor and KTE::Range non-virtual for maximum speed
• removed KTE::EditorChooser, since Kate Part is the only implementation since over 10 years. Just use KTE::Editor* editor = KTE::editor(); to get KatePart.
• new signal KTE::Document::readWriteChanged()
• removed KTE::LoadSaveFilterCheckPlugin, was unused since years
• removed all KTE::Smart* classes in favor of KTE::Moving* classes
• merged KTE::CoordinatesToCursorInterface into KTE::View
• new: KTE::Range KTE::Document::wordRangeAt(KTE::Cursor)
• new: QString KTE::Document::wordAt(KTE::Cursor)
• new: KTE::DocumentCursor
• ported lots of KSharedPtr to QSharedData
• updated Mainpage.dox to reflect porting notes
• some small interface cleanups and additions

Please feel free to join the porting fun. Just follow the Frameworks compile guide and checkout the git branch “frameworks” in the Kate git module.

Greetings from the Kate land again. This time, Alex Turbov will spend a few words about his “C++/boost Style” indenter that is part of Kate Part for several releases.

The Initial Motivation

This indenter (initially) was designed to help code typing in a “boost::mpl” style (i.e. with leading comma in formatted (template) parameters list). One may read the rationale of such approach in the “C++ Template Metaprogramming: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques from Boost and Beyond” by David Abrahams and Aleksey Gurtovoy. It is really easy to miss a comma when invoke metafunctions and it usually leads to a lot of complicated compile errors. The indenting technique should help to visualize the control syntax and prevent stupid errors like missed commas.

After starting the “frameworks” branch in kate.git more than a week ago but doing not much beside an initial KTextEditor compile & link port I felt a big guilty ;)

Given a lot of people blog about the progress of programs X and Y for Qt 5.2 and KDE Frameworks 5 I guess it is time that KatePart joins this club.

Some hours later, a ‘working’ version of KatePart and KWrite have landed in the “frameworks” branch of kate.git. KWrite launches, loads the part and the open action even works (command line parsing is off-line btw. ATM).

After thinking some days about how to tackle the 4.x => 5.x transition in Kate (KTextEditor/Part/Application) and the nice “what we should do” blog by Dominik, I think the time for fun is there.

Therefore I started to port our stuff to KF5 in the “frameworks” branch.

The basic idea would be: get it compiling and running.

Then we can decide if the frameworks branch is a mere “hack to see if it works” experiment which can be later used to port master without a lot of work or if we say “ok, works kind of well” and we just switch development over for new features from master to frameworks and with that from 4.x to 5.x.

Kate has this nifty little plugin called “XML Completion.” This plugin loads a Meta DTD file and uses this information for context sensitive completion. To use it, you first have to load it in the settings dialog, and then assign a Meta DTD through the XML menu:

In our example, we work on a Kate XML highlighting definition file and therefore loaded the file “language.dtd.xml” which is shipped with Kate. Having assigned a Meta DTD file, we now have these nice code hints: