Kate Partly Moving to Gitorious

We are about to move the applications Kate and KWrite as well as the libraries KTextEditor and Kate Part to gitorious. Christoph is working on the migration right now in order to keep the development history. Things look good so far, so the migration is soon finished.
We have discussed a bit about the migration to gitorious on the Kate Developer Meeting and Christoph came up with this mainly because building only KTextEditor, Kate Part, KWrite and Kate is much faster and easier compared to building the KDE modules kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase, kdesdk.
I myself remember the time where I started KDE development, and it took more than two weeks to have a first successful build of KDE. You have to learn so many things at once, like revision control, lots of so far unknown software, and what not. Talking to other developers verifies this. In other words: Getting into KDE development is not easy and straight forward.
Moving to gitorious removes this barrier for Kate development: You just checkout the Kate repository and that's all you need. It would be nice if you join Kate development and contribute patches :)
What does that mean for Kate in KDE? Nothing changes. We will merge the changes in Gitorious back to the main KDE development line and vice versa.

The Power of Developer Meetings

Since several years, we have lots of small developer meetings in the KDE project, gratefully supported by the KDE e.V. There, developers of a certain project (e.g. KMail/kdepim, Plasma, you name it) meet to discuss further plans and to push the project further. From experience we can tell that those meetings are really beneficial in several ways:

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor. This also happens at KDE's annual conference Akademy, although there are a lot more people.
  
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about how to do what are very focused. It's amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I haven't seen such focused work in companies, yet. I guess the variance in the knowledge of people involved is higher. And the motivation is usually very different).
  
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
  
• Steady Contributions: We are always open for new contributors. Just send a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants of a developer meeting usually contribute for years to come.

Enough said, here is what happened the last three days in Kate:

• memory optimization: remove unused edit history items
  
• fix crash in doHighlight due to wrong initialization
  
• don't squeeze captions in the window title
  
• fix crash when using katepart in e.g. konqueror
  
• kate vi mode improvements
  
• fix: invalid js commands lead to a crash
  
• share code snippets between kate and kdevelop
  
• more syntax highlighting files for asm dialects
  
• replace: show number of replacements in a passive popup
  
• new command line command: unwrap
  
• fix crash when switching sessions with multiple main windows
  
• fix incorrect global replace %s///g
  
• fix crash in smart range group handling
  
• turn search option "highlight all" into the action "find all"
  
• replace old text snippet plugin with new one
  
• optimize away nops for text editing
  
• fixes in the template handler code
  
• remove pythong browser plugin, since the symbol viewer plugin can do the same and much more
  
• remove unmaintained html tools plugin, since it was never ported
  
• optimization for bracket matching
  
• new text snippet plugin: context aware snippet completion
  
• fix filtering in the file browser plugin
  
• always start search&replace from cursor
  
• developer doumentation for smart range usage
  
• cstyle indenter: fix indentation of multi-line comments
  
• update of syntax highlighting for MySQL
  
• performance optimization in the highlighting system: bug, bug
  
• fix crash in removeTrailingSpaces, if undo/redo is active
  
• new interface for getting the mode at a given cursor
  
• search & replace: lots of code cleanups
  
• basic regression tests for search, scripting, and more...
  
• scripting: add support for quoting in command line scripts
  
• Kate crashes because of spell checking
  
• fix regression: with auto brackets + selection
  
• find-in-files: set filter correctly when opening the search
  
• fix: make reload-scripts work with new functions
  
• share a KCompletion object between all KateCmdLineEdits
  

There are even more changes I left out. Most of those changes will be in KDE 4.4.1. If you want to help, join #kate in irc.kde.org!

Developer Meeting: More on scripting Kate

We are 10 people here at the developer meeting in Berlin. Kate, KDevelop as well as Okteta see a lot of commits. I'll mainly talk about what's happening in the holy Kate land, though :-)
Yesterday I closed a bug requesting an "unwrap" feature in Kate that works like "Tools > Join Lines" but maintains paragraph separation, i.e., empty lines are not removed. This feature is implemented now in javascript. Further infos:

• the bug report
• the javascript implementation

To run the script simply switch to the command line (F7) and write "unwrap". If you have further ideas about useful scripts, don't hesitate to start hacking right away, see also

• how to extend Kate with scripting

Fixes with regard to the scripting support in the last days are

• make reload-scripts work properly
• fix command line completion for new scripts without restarting kate
  
• support quoting in arguments for scripts
• fix crash for invalid commands in scripts

Those fixes will be in KDE 4.4.1. More to come in other blog entries :-)