[KDE Dot News]
 faq
 flatforty
 contribute
 subscribe
 configure
 search
 rdf
 main


  Kate Developers Meeting
Community and Events Posted by Dominik Haumann on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @07:21
from the get-an-edge-on-editing dept.
A Kate Developer Meeting was held last weekend hosted by basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt to great success. Developers interested in improving KDE's advanced text editor met to shape the roadmap of Kate. An impressive nine attendees turned up including several new faces.

From left to right: Dominik Haumann, Erlend Hamberg, Christoph Cullmann, Joseph Wenninger, Paul Giannaros, Leo Savernik, Christian Ehrlicher, Anders Lund (photo taken by Tobias Hunger)

On Saturday we started early and discussed the following agenda

  • Scripting
  • Indentation
  • Kate Sessions
  • Extending the highlighting system
  • Collaborative editing
  • Text input modes (vi mode)
  • Minor topics: Search & replace, text completion
  • Interface review
  • Simplifying KWrite

In short, scripting support will allow us to extend Kate with little helper and indentation scripts. We rethought Kate's session workflow to better meet the user's needs. There are plans to allow combined highlighting, which means mixing e.g. HTML and php syntax highlighting will be even more powerful. Collaborative features was also a point which is especially interesting with regard to Decibel. Another hot topic is the support of additional input modes (vi mode) for power users. Other work includes interfaces for e.g. line annotations, which can be used by KDevelop to show svn annotations inside the editor. Besides that, KWrite - the simple version of Kate - was stripped down to not confuse the users. Experts still can turn on the advanced mode to have a full featured KWrite application. For detailed results please read the developer meeting protocol.

Apart from the discussions there were other highlights like Kate running smoothly on Windows or basysKom's coffee machine. We are really pleased with the results of the meeting and plan to repeat it on a yearly basis.

Thanks to basysKom GmbH, the KDE e.V. and Joseph Wenninger for making this event happen.



<  |  >

 
  Related Links
 ·   Articles on Community and Events
 ·   Also by Dominik Haumann
 ·   Contact author

Thread Threshold:

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )

Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
how about snippets?
by Paul on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @08:33
I really missed them from emacs.
[ Reply To This | View ]
Congrats
by Pablo Cholaky on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @09:20
That`s great, my enviroment for programming is Kate, or sometimes kwrite, is a excelent app, and any upgrade would be nice :)
[ Reply To This | View ]
Model KWrite after GEdit, keep Kate for geeks
by Tray on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @10:11
I'm certainly not a GNOME partisan, but when it comes to fitting the needs of the average user, GEdit is by far better than KWrite. Getting rid of all the programming-specific options like "Code Folding", "Switch to Command Line", "Highlight range between selected brackets", different colors for "Base-N Integer", "Modes & Filetypes", and the "Select to Matching Bracket" keyboard shortcut, as was apparently discussed in this meeting, is a great step toward making KWrite a general-purpose simple text editor. But this is going to be hard, because niche settings for programmers are spread everywhere in KWrite's menus and configuration system.

There is also extreme redundancy and confusion about shortcuts. For example, Settings-> Configure Editor -> Shortcuts lists a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts (such as "Select to Matching Bracket") that don't even appear when the user goes to Settings-> Configure Shortcuts. And vice-versa, shortcuts in Settings-> Configure Shortcuts such as "Undo" don't appear in Settings-> Configure Editor -> Shortcuts.

By the way: does the "Show Path" option under the Settings menu do anything in KWrite?
[ Reply To This | View ]
Thank you!
by Mariano on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @11:07
[...]There are plans to allow combined highlighting, which means mixing e.g. HTML and php syntax highlighting will be even more powerful[...]

That, along with correct indentation in php, is what I'm missing since 2, 3? years in kate.
[ Reply To This | View ]
Firefox
by Michael on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @12:17
What makes IMHO Firefox great is the fact that they introduce new features which are useful instantly without much learning, installing extensions whatever and which don't clutter the interface or menus at all. In Firefox3 for example I can use the address bar for searching page titles in my history. No new control elements, no scripts, plugins, extensions - whatever. An existing feature made better. I'm sometimes missing this kind of innovation in various applications, including Kate. Some ideas:

* Better look/grouping of open file list. Perhaps with headings for each server, spacing, sorting etc.
* Intelligent editing functions working in the background like: If I modify a variable name two or three times let there be a non-obstrusive bar at the bottom (like the new find bar) saying: Click here to replace this name in the whole function/Click here to replace this name in the whole document.
* Additional information popups reminding you of the number/order of parameters in user-defined (all currently open documents) as well as native functions. Option to go to say php.net/strpos for reference or to jump to declaration of user-defined functions
* Automatically detecting if there are two similar looking documents currently open and being able to start KCompare

Nevertheless, Kate is already great without all those features. Big thanks to all the developers!
[ Reply To This | View ]
Feed
by Petteri on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @12:18
Finally full feed for dot.kde.org, thanks!
[ Reply To This | View ]
Scripting language
by Martin on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @12:45
How about supporting a subset of elisp? Allowing much Emacs code to be used or ported.
[ Reply To This | View ]
"* Collaborative editing"
by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @13:14
In short: Oooh yeah ;)
[ Reply To This | View ]
Kate, Bidi, and OpenType
by KDE Wellwisher on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @14:31
To the Kate developers (or anyone knowledgeable):

1. Are there any plans to complete bidirectionality support for Kate? Both KEdit and gedit have it, what is needed for this to happen to Kate?

2. How does Kate process OpenType? Does it use Pango, or does Qt have its own layout engine?

Best wishes
KDE Wellwisher
[ Reply To This | View ]
notepad++
by T. J. Brumfield on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @15:23
Easily my favorite text editor on any platform.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

It is open source, and damned near perfect. I'd love to see a straight KDE port of this, or to see Kate operate more like notepad++, or include some notepad++ features.

The only feature that notepad++ is lacking that I enjoy is easy comparison/diff/merge tools like WinMerge, or UltraEdit/UltraCompare. Obviously, in Linux you have diff and patch at the command line, but having visual components for these features is pretty nice.
[ Reply To This | View ]
Oh, vi mode~~~
by horse on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @17:02
I tried a lot to find the vi mode in Kate... It seemed that there used to be some work but not stable... Hope that one day this can come true. :)
[ Reply To This | View ]
Search and replace in multiple files
by Batiste on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @23:18
Hello,

Does Kate have a search and replace for multiple files? I know I can do it in shell:

find -iname "*.html" | xargs grep -l "hello world" | xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/hello world/boum/'

But it's very complicated for what it does and I can't remember the syntax.
[ Reply To This | View ]
looking forward to Kate+Vim
by Philip Webb on Wednesday 16/Apr/2008, @01:40
I'm a regular user of Gvim, but would love to have a KDE version instead.
There was an attempt to create one which fell apart some time ago,
so I'm very pleased to see plans to pick it up again.

Please don't dumb down Kwrite ! After all, there is Kedit for beginners.
Kwrite is a nice medium between Vim & eg Leafpad: please leave it as it is.

Otherwise & generally, thanks to the KDE team for a great desktop.
[ Reply To This | View ]
A wish
by A KDE advocate on Sunday 20/Apr/2008, @14:44
Can I make a a wish - a filesystem treeview in Kate? ^^;
[ Reply To This | View ]

 
The Fine Print: The previous comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )
  "I ride my bicycle." -- Michael Häckel
KDE®, "K Desktop Environment", "KDE Dot News", "got the dot?" and the KDE Logo® are trademarks or registered trademarks of KDE e.V. in the European Union, the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster. The rest: Copyright © 2000-2008 KDE e.V. for The KDE Project. For further information or comments on this site, please contact the Webmaster.
[ home | post article | flat forty | subscribe | search | rdf ]