Kate

The below notes is what was decided at the development sprint in Darmstadt on April 11-13, 2008

Short term goals

1. Scripting, part level QtScript
2. API for indentation scripts
3. Sessions handling
4. make text completion work!
5. VI-Modes (GSoC-project)

Long term goals

1. Scripting at application level (Kate): Kross
2. Combination of highlightings & indentations

This article was originally published as a blog entry at http://alweb.dk/blog/anders/kate_named_sessions and is now donated to this website.

The biggest change in Kate (http://kate.kde.org, http://www.kate-editor.org) in the KDE 3.5 series is definitely the introduction of named sessions. Instead of defaulting to one instance, Kate now as a standard allows you to run many instances. And not even that, it will allow you to keep those sessions, with the list of open files as well as the instance specific GUI configuration. This is a big change in behavior, but once you get used to it, you will hopefully appreciate the benefits.

If not, it is still possible to restore the old-style kate behavior by utilizing the various related commandline and configuration options. You will of course loose at least some of the advantages of named settings, but if you desire keeping things as they were, you probably do not care a lot.

Because this is new, there are of course problems and unforeseen issues. Due to busyness with real life, I have not had a chance to get much into named sessions prior to the KDE 3.5/Kate 2.5 release, but I have been working hard on enhancing the named sessions experience for KDE 3.5.1/Kate 2.5.1 and upwards.

Read on for more about how it works, what have been fixed so far and some ideas for future improvements.

This article was imported form wiki.kate-editor.org. Note that kscript is no longer available in Kate since v. 2.4. If you absolutely have to, it is still possible to run dcop scripts using the External Tools feature.

Incorporation of a script into Kate

Kate works with all scripts which are defined by desktop files in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kate/scripts/ directory where $KDEDIR stands for the director where KDE looks for its files, for example /usr/kde, or for your own directory in ~/.kde/. In the first case the scripts are available for all users, in the latter only for yourself. This desktop file has the following structure:

Introduction

First at all, why writing plugins for an editor ? Good question, and I hope I have a good answer: Because we want the base app be small and all extended features not all users need should go into plugins (like CVS suppport, project managment, coffee cooking ;) Therefore Kate provides a quite fullfeatured plugin interface and interfaces to all important stuff in the kate application (the documents, views, mainwindows, sidebar ...).