[kdevqtdesigner] Help to port kdevqtdesigner in to KDevelop 5

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday October 17 2018 04:21:18 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:

Hi,

>Another issue with the plugin is that in KDevelop/KDevPlatform switching 
>between text editor view and custom editor view seems broken meanwhile and not 
>possible for the same file, something has regressed in kdevplatform when it 
>comes to that feature over what I think to remember from kdevelop4. So once 
>the plugin is active, one currently no longer can edit UI files as plain text, 
>only be the plugin.

This rings a bell, I have definitely seen behaviour like that in KDevelop (probably v4, possibly with other doc types too).

>Personally as before I would like to see more non-text editor integration in 
>KDevelop, but seems current maintainers have no own needs here, so not pushing 

My 2 cents:

Honestly I think I agree with Aleix here. KDevelop already has a large list of plugins which are built and installed and loaded by default, many of which are probably unused or even irrelevant much of the time for lots of users. But they do consume resources, and that's something KDevelop already does extremely well for its core functionality.

Better and more integration is always nice but it can also be done with external applications, like my own mod which allows opening Qt help documentation links in an external viewer, or the ZealSearch plugin. This also has the advantage that you can put the 2 (or more) views as you want on your screen(s) and don't have to switch back and forth between tabs inside a single application.

Apple's Xcode IDE has suffered from the same integration drive; before v4 it was relatively lightweight and only contained a doc viewer which could sadly not be run separately; the UI editor/designer was a separate app as were a number of the analytic instruments. Now everything is included in a single monolithic application which, as a result, takes a lot longer to start and a lot more resources to run.

What I do miss in KF5 is the kuiviewer which apparently didn't get ported and which was very handy to take a quick (and cheap) peek at .ui files without having to fire up a more cumbersome editor. Wouldn't porting that and giving it a kpart design allow sufficient integration at least for previewing .ui files? Note that I'd still prefer to use the external application if the kpart were to reuse the main KDevelop window instead of a dedicated window that would show the UI more like it would appear in the target application.

R