dotkde's Blurty

Kate Developers Meeting
http://dot.kde.org/1208269318/

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.