[dot] Report of the Kate Meeting

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1208269318/

From: Dominik Haumann <dhdev at gmx.de>
Dept: get-an-edge-on-editing
Date: Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @07:21

Report of the Kate Meeting
==========================

   A Kate Developer Meeting was held last weekend hosted by basysKom
GmbH [http://www.basyskom.de/] in Darmstadt to great success. Developers
interested in improving KDE's advanced text editor
[http://kate-editor.org/] 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
[http://decibel.kde.org/]. 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.
 [http://www.kate-editor.org/news/development-sprint-results]
     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 [http://www.basyskom.de/], the KDE e.V.
[http://ev.kde.org] and Joseph Wenninger [http://www.jowenn.net] for
making this event happen.