Kate Developers Meeting

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.

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Comments

by Martin (not verified)

How about supporting a subset of elisp? Allowing much Emacs code to be used or ported.

by alsuren (not verified)

elisp support would require a kross interface first, I assume. If anyone is interested in writing one, talk to Sebastian Sauer or whoever was last to commit something interesting to kross in svn.

by Paul (not verified)

No, it wouldn't alsuren. Kate doesn't use Kross. KatePart is being ported to use QtScript, and though are plans to add Kross support for the Kate application, they are fairly distant at the moment.

by Dan Leinir Turt... (not verified)

In short: Oooh yeah ;)

by alsuren (not verified)

Collaborative editing is already possible in a branch of abiword using telepathy's tubes. If kate wants to do something like this, a good way to start would be to create a "help editing..." menu entry that will search for advertised documents on the local session bus. This would be useful for things like MPX[1] or ssh sessions. Getting the bridge working should be something that happens afterwards. (if you ask me, dbus bridging should really be done without the need for telepathy, but I could rant on that for ages)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPX

by KDE Wellwisher (not verified)

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

by maor (not verified)

1) Bidi already supported

2) Qt has it's own engine

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

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.

by Me (not verified)

Erm... Kompare (Development module)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompare

by vivo (not verified)

sorry winmerge is superior, permit edit of files being written

by horse (not verified)

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. :)

by fhd (not verified)

Wooh, that would be THE ONE killer feature enabling me to get rid of gvim on both Linux and Windows and use kate instead!

gvim's gui (that's all gvim is about in the first place) is somewhat rotten and feature incomplete. Also, it really lacks the possibility to change to the easy input mode in an instand. When co-workers try touch my editor, they're like pissed after two seconds. With kate, I could just switch the input mode to something sane in an instant :)

Without missing powerfull keyboard-only tools vi (okay, loads of improvements from vim) offers.
AND one would find vi input mode all over KDE, wherever KatePart is used!

Hellyeah, I bloody WANT THAT! Where is the donate button?!

by Erlend (not verified)

Google pushed the donate button:
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/kde/about.html
("Vi-like, modal editing mode for Kate")

by fhd (not verified)

I feel like kissing this guy, can't wait for the summer (of code...) to end!

by Batiste (not verified)

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.

by Benoit Jacob (not verified)

Tip: you can install the "rpl" command-line utility. There is a GPL version of it, at least Debian has it.

rpl -R oldstring newstring directory/

by Andras (not verified)

I agree. I don't care much about folding or sessions or vi mode (I use vi if I want vi mode!), but "Find/replace in ALL OPEN files" the most important nontrivial feature I look for in every programmer's editor. It's just a must if you want to do some serious refactoring (rename class/function) in a larger codebase.

Unfortunately, Kate (and GEdit) don't have it, so they are out for serious programming for me. Usually I end up running MED or Textpad in Wine...

Kate developer, can you hear me...? Please, give me an "[ ] in all open files" checkbox in the Find/Replace dialog!!!

I strongly second this... and for exactly the same reason.

by Matt Kantor (not verified)

Thirded!

by Philip Webb (not verified)

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.

by Anon (not verified)

"After all, there is Kedit for beginners"

Not in KDE4, there isn't :)

by reihal (not verified)

It will be, the Oracle told me.

by Ziling Zhao (not verified)

I've been looking and hoping for yzis (http://yzis.org) to come to fruitation, but it seems like it has stalled.

Yzis seems like "the right way to do it" in that it decouples it self from the interface and allows for kparting.

by A KDE advocate (not verified)

Can I make a a wish - a filesystem treeview in Kate? ^^;

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

A wish I most heartily second! It would be fantastic to have that for many of my real world use cases for Kate (code, web, song tabs, system notes, etc).