Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Thursday 26 January 2006 00:40, Alexander Dymo wrote:
...
> I'm not going to say now we did wrong all that time. Certainly KDevelop
> has tons of useful features now and KDevelop Platform attracted Quanta
> developers and made possible Kuanta to be born.
>
> But in fact we paid too much attention to the architecture and platform
> and little attention to the "usability" (usability as in usable for
> development tasks, not usability as good GUI).
> I've been watching at core KDE developers for three years. They still use
> vi (emacs). Why? Looks like KDevelop doesn't have clear benefits as
> a development tool for them. This is, of course my opinion and I'd really
> like to hear from KDE developers what they think is wrong in KDevelop.
>
> But I have my own experience that tells me that KDevelop is usually
> not a best tool for my development tasks. It's a cool IDE, but not for me.
> Wtf? I participated in its development, I implemented many things and
> now I don't use it much. This question bothers me every day and I'm
> going to get an answer from myself at the first place.
>
> Heh, I know the part of the answer. I need a convenient tool to "just do
> the job". KDevelop 3.x is not there yet. It doesn't fit my workflow and
> IMHO it doesn't fit the workflow of many KDE developers.

Ok, here come my two cents.

I didn't use kdevelop at all before KDevelop 3.
I use it since has the ideal interface mode.
In this mode all the room is available for the editor, and e.g. the compile 
view only opens when I press "compile". Also the open file list on the left 
hand side only opens when I want to switch to another file.
I really love the feature that the views close automatically again when a file 
is selected.
Usually I hide/remove almost all plugins and toolbar button, so that kdevelop 
looks uncluttered.

I don't use the mouse often with kdevelop.
Shortcuts I use regularly:
-Alt-Ctrl-O: open a dialog for opening files which belong to the project, with 
autocompletion
-Alt-Shift+7: switch to another open file, which autocompletion
-Alt-Ctrl-F: search through many files
-Ctrl-F/Ctrl-R: find/replace
-F8: compile project
-F4: jump to next compile warning/error
-Shift-Alt-Ctrl-B: close/open view at the bottom
-Shift-F12: switch header/implementation
-Ctrl-Left/Right: move by words
-Ctrl-K: delete line
-home: change between position 1 and first character of a word

What I miss/what could be improved:
-Ctrl-d: duplicate line
-Ctrl-k: delete till end of line
-Ctrl-y: delete line
-Shift-Enter: insert a line, but keep the cursor on the same line, i.e. the 
newly inserted line
-a shortcut for quickly going to a class/function, it exists, but there are 
two many dialogs until you are finally there
-opening and closing projects is very slow
-quick navigation between files, this is already quite good (ctrl-alt-o, 
shift-ctrl-7) but navigating the file tree sidebar isn't optimal
-the GUI doesn't remember the settings of the side views (size and sticky or 
not)
-some reliable autocompletion, doesn't even have to be too smart, just 
reliable. As it is now sometimes it tries to complete, sometimes not. I have 
no idea under which circumstances. Does it work better of the headers are 
part of the project ?

-an outline of the current file, listing all functions. There are actually 
several issues with this. The class view is not usable, the tree is too 
deeply inserted, and you have to navigate manually to the class you are 
interested in, i.e. the focus is not automatically on the class you are 
currently in. The combobox in the toolbar listing all functions in a file is 
nice, but if you have long function names or parameter lists, you see only 
the end of it. maybe showing the beginning and/or leaving out the parameters 
would help. Additionally this combobox is not accessible via a shortcut. The 
list of files in the RMB menu has been already removed, I think, this is 
good. A principal problem with the approach used in kdevelop is that it only 
parses files which belong to the project. For kate (and other editors) there 
is also a simple regexp-based mode, which works good enough in many cases. 
Opening a not-project file in kdevelop sucks.

For kde development I usually still use xfte and konsole, mainly because I 
don't want to create a project first before I can start editing (if we would 
use cmake this argument would simply go away).
At work, where I am working on embedded non-KDE software, I use kdevelop every 
day and it works really good. Debugging on a remote target is problematic.
Often I have another editor open, kate or xfte if I want to compare stuff.
For small editing tasks I use joe, nowadays it even does syntax highlighting.
(I am probably one of the very few KDE developers who neither can use vi nor 
emacs).

Bye
Alex
-- 
Work: alexander.neundorf AT jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
Home: neundorf AT kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
      alex AT neundorf.net               - http://www.neundorf.net