KDevelop 4 - current showstoppers

Hamish Rodda rodda at kde.org
Wed Oct 31 12:56:09 UTC 2007


Hi,

I realise that we're not releasing kdevelop 4 with kde 4.0, but I don't think 
that should stop us from trying to get it into some sort of usable state.  
There are really great things going on under the hood which I think will make 
kdevelop 4 certainly the most advanced IDE that I have ever seen for certain 
uses, but at the moment there are a few things stopping it from even being 
useful as a plain text editor (imho):

1) User Interface
* We can't hide the dock widgets like we could in kdevelop 3.  Thus, it's very 
difficult and annoying to get a reasonably sized text editor window.
* The dock widgets are significantly out of proportion on startup (bottom 
widget takes 3/4 of the screen).
* File modification status is not visible anywhere - it should at least be in 
the title bar and the document selector bar
* I couldn't get a shortcut to switch documents working.
* No recently opened files action (trivially fixable)

2) Projects
* Build selected project - no feedback when no project is selected
* Currently selected project mechanism is hidden / broken usability - you 
currently need to select project from project manager, should be an entry in 
the project menu to select between them.  If there's only a single project, 
it should always be the currently selected project
* Files aren't saved prior to building (I tried to fix this but so far I think 
it's still failing)

3) Configuration
* Shouldn't configure project be in the project menu?
* Where did all of the options go?  I know at one point we had a config dialog 
for the c++ background parser
* Configuration of tool views is not saved.  KMainWindow can do this for us if 
we set unique object names on each tool view, and then call 
applyMainWindowSettings and setAutoSaveSettings.  However we need all 
toolviews loaded at that time, so we will probably need custom code for 
non-global tool views.

Hopefully this can stir up some interest in fixing these relatively minor 
issues which are holding back kdevelop from gaining more use and thus more 
interested developers etc.

Cheers,
Hamish
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