Friday, September 18, 2009

News from the Holy Kate Land

Since we now all know that Kate is holy (thanks to rms. By accident, he obviously confused Kate with emacs, though) let's have a look at what's going on. In the last months Kate development is quite active, so here is a quick update:
  • new: on-the-fly spell checking thanks to Michel Ludwig. Highlights include e.g. spell checking in comments of source code or latex parts. Also, constructs like sch\"on work in latex.
  • extended scripting support in the command line, more on that later
  • more and more mature vi input mode
  • lots of bug fixing. quite impressive bug squashing by Pascal Létourneau for more than 4 months now
  • lots of refactoring and code cleanups thanks to Bernhard!
  • "Find in Files" appears by default again in the tool view,
  • "File Browser" uses UrlNavigator, huge code cleanup
  • convenience updates of syntax highlighting
  • delayed highlighting of code folding ranges to prevent flickering on mouse move
  • new command line commands: 'toggle-header' in the Open Header plugin. 'grep' and 'find-in-files'
  • haskell and lilypond indenter
  • much, much more, see commits for details.
Thanks to all contributors involved in Kate development. Keep it up :)

6 comments:

zak89 said...

This is not directly related to your post, but I wanted to thank you for what has become my preferred "IDE" (over the likes of Eclipse, JEdit, Netbeans, and InteliJ Idea). I use it extensively for my Groovy/Grails development and it absolutely rocks (though I wouldn't mind if Groovy and GSP syntax support was added at some point... hint hint!). Lightweight enough for me to do serious development on my netbook! Awesome stuff. Thanks!

Unknown said...

I am using Kate as Python editor at work. But with KDE 4.3, Kate (or more generally ktexteditor KPart) became very badly usable for me. For example code folding doesn't work for Python code anymore (bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205708).

Also word auto completion is unreliable and inconsistent (bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203039).

Please, can you fix these problems? It is really important for me. Kate is my favorite editor, but with these problems, I would have to find another one :-(

Diederik van der Boor said...

Wonderful news :-) This in turns means that KDE 4.4 will also have an improved Kate. So improvements everywhere. I like that :-) Oh and I can't wait for a usable VI-input mode. Kate's document viewer and KIO support would make it much easier to handle huge projects, while still enjoying VI mode. :-)

Unknown said...

Nice to hear about all the progress going into the new kate and I appreciate the work of all you developers very much.
Unfortunately there is still a very important feature missing from the good old kate 3 times (best allround GUI editor I can think of) to which I would like you to point at because I think the corresponding bug report( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164413) simply does not get the attention it deserves in my opinion. It's about text replacement in block selection mode. Although it looks like to be ported to kate 4 (all the checkboxes, buttons etc. for this task are implemented) it actually does not work as intended (see bug report for an example). It's quite a pity as this feature was one of my (and according to the comments in the bug report also some other people's) reasons having kate 3 selected as the favorite editor.
It would be very nice to see this feature back in kate 4 again.

Thanks & keep up the good work!

vivo said...

may be a rewrite of the find/replace dialog looking at what it did in the kde 3.5 days would be the way.
Having the choice to use the old "dialog" or the new "panel" would be awesome, maybe even at compile time if not otherwise doable

Elv13 said...

There is a regression since the bunch of kate commit, indentation type tend to reset itself for no reason every 30 seconds.

It is annoying, is it possible to fix it now or should I revert to stable versions?