Kate: Shortcomings of .kateconfig file

Assume you have a .kateconfig file optimized for C++ code that replaces tabs on save. Now you open a Makefile that contains tabs (due to its strict syntax). If you save the Makefile in kate, the tabs then are replaced which results in a corrupted Makefile.

In other words: The .kateconfig file applies to every file. It lacks mimetype/extension support and thus can lead to unwanted behaviours.

So if you use a .kateconfig file, keep that in mind :) Maybe we should simply use modelines in the h/cpp files for now.

Indentation and Coding Style

kdelibs will have coding style conventions. In general. this is not a bad idea. Our 45528 slocs in KatePart all use a consistent indent-width of 2 spaces. Changing this does not really make sense - ok, if svn praise -w (sure, we never need svn blame in our code ;) finally works, we can discuss this again.

In other words: How "consistent" will kdelibs get with this new conventions? The interesting part of Zack's mail is

[...]
No exceptions. Either everything or nothing
[...]

While everything would really be cool, in truth it's not possible to achieve, is it? We will have exceptions or rather violations, I'm pretty sure :)

Some developers already start adding katepart modelines to their souce code. For those who don't know yet: You also can simply use a single .kateconfig file, which is the equivalent to emacs dir config files. You just have to make sure to set the search depth for a .kateconfig file to - let's say - 3. Do this in

Settings > Configure Kate... > Open/Save

Kate Project Plugin

It is not a secret that removing Kate's project manager in KDE 3.5 was not the right thing to do. It seems a lot of people used it and we got many complaints about this decision. That also shows that it is hard go get feedback about what users are really using. If a feature is done well, noone will ever talk about it. This is paradox, as we thought the project manager was not well integrated :) (I still think that)

Ok, let's come to the interesting part: Three developers wrote a new Kate Project Manager Plugin and published an initial release on sourceforge.net and on kde-apps.org. It works quite well already and reading the comments on kde-apps.org gives me the impression that there are more features to come with the next release. -- If you are interested maybe you want to join the project...

PS: I have the secret hope the plugin will be ported to KDE4 using Qt's model/view architecture, so that it has good support for multiple mainwindows :)

Access Keys

Our beloved konqueror browser supports a nice feature called access keys. To enable the access key mode you simply have to press ctrl. I quite often use ctrl+c/v in forms, and thus happen to trigger actions accidentally all the time. We are lucky though, as you can disable the feature by putting

[Access Keys]
Enabled=false

into your ~/.kde/share/config/khtmlrc