People Behind KDE: Christoph Cullmann

Monday, 21 November 2005  |  Jriddell

This man maintains KDE's text editor Kate and the associated KTextEditor interface. He also keeps three cats and disappears from his girlfriend for a week each year in the name of KDE. The star of tonight's People Behind KDE interview is Christoph Cullmann.

Comments:

Which text editor do you use? Why? - Thiago Macieira - 2005-11-21

We'd be shocked if the reply was "Emacs" :-) Great interview, Christoph. Now, can you share with us your secret of super-fast-porting-Kate-to-KDE4? It'll sure help in kdelibs.

Re: Which text editor do you use? Why? - Swoosh - 2005-11-21

I would just love to have emacs embedded in kdevelop. I guess this should be possible after kdevelop has been ported to Qt4.

Re: Which text editor do you use? Why? - Narishma - 2005-11-21

After kdevelop has been ported to emacs you mean ? :p

Re: Which text editor do you use? Why? - Swoosh - 2005-11-21

Well, I guess one can argue how serious my comment was. I just got a bit inspired by this: http://blogs.qtdeveloper.net/archives/2005/08/10/playing-around-with-xembed/ Unfortunately the screenshot showing the stuff in action seems to be gone...

Re: Which text editor do you use? Why? - petteri - 2005-11-22

I just hope that some day Kate will have decent Emacs profile which will include emacs-like identation and most of the magical key bindings.

Kate - Ian Monroe - 2005-11-21

Kate is just a nice piece of software. Thanks!

Just nice - Pascal Klein - 2005-11-21

Lovely interview. Christoph, in case you read this: thanks a bundle for Kate. It is my favourite text editor. I even install the KDE libraries when I work under a GNOME environment just so I can use it. ^_^ I'll remember to say hi next time I re-visit Germany again. Ich bin von Mainz. Cheers and kudos.

K8 is gr8 - Roy Schestowitz - 2005-11-21

Kate is great (rhyme intended). Keep up the great work!

Re: K8 is gr8 - A well known fact! - Phase II - 2005-11-21

The Bouncing Souls already knew this before - and that was back in 1997! http://www.letssingit.com/?/bouncing-souls-k8-is-great-qkc1cm9.html

Agree on KHTML - m. - 2005-11-21

Completely agree - KHTML is really underrated. Only KJS could be faster.

Re: Agree on KHTML - ac - 2005-11-21

khtml rocks the house I agree about kjs, see here: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113921

Re: Agree on KHTML - testerus - 2005-11-22

There are slow pages for almost all browsers. http://blog.naver.com/applezhome makes my Konqueror unusable.

OT: the dot == Ark linux - Sam Weber - 2005-11-21

Did anyone else experience yesterday that the dot == ark linux? I typed in dot.kde.org and and the page at http://www.arklinux.org/ showed up. I was like, whoa :) Good to see it back. -Sam

Re: OT: the dot == Ark linux - Jack H - 2005-11-21

Yeah, KDE Dot seemed to be down for a while, and then just before it seemed to be working again I got the same thing as you! It was rather confusing :S

Re: OT: the dot == Ark linux - Phase II - 2005-11-21

The dot is hosted by Ark Linux (again). Throw in a downtime, a configuration error and someone with his fingers glued onto the refresh button and you get this..! ;-)

As a writer, thanks - jameth - 2005-11-22

I am a writer by trade and passion, and Kate is the best thing out there. When on a Mac, I can abide using TextEdit, so long as I switch it to plain-text mode, and even then it's only fine because the place I end up using Macs at has enormous monitors and I can have three windows open side-by-side. On Windows, I have no options. Wordpad in text-only mode is acceptable, but has problems, and has no support for multiple files (and most Windows machines don't have the same cinema display monitors as the Macs). Notepad is a joke, and Word trys to fix my spelling! All GNOME gives me is Gedit, which is only a couple steps ahead of Notepad, and if I try something like Abiword it has the lesser issues of MS-Word: thinking it should have page-borders and formatting and options. In Kate, I can easily keep open all ten-to-fifteen things I'm working on 24-hours-a-day seven-days-a-week and it's always responsive and easy to use. It's just the flat-out best text editor around (well, vim gives some competition, but only for some specific tasks). And again, Thanks for Kate, it defines my workflow.

Re: As a writer, thanks - jameth - 2005-11-22

Also, I just added my vote and comments to bug 65740, the only issue I have with Kate. That is: please add an option to get a word-count for the selected text. Right now, I need to use a console and wc. Hopefully that can get added to improve an already great application.

Excellent - Amr Youssef - 2005-11-23

Wish you all the best