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With the Qt 6.7 release, Qt introduced a wide range of improvement for the text rendering and font shaping.

One element of this is that you can now configure OpenType font features.

Many of the 'new cool' programming fonts have such features integrated. That includes both free fonts like Cascadia Code or paid fonts like MonoLisa.

Let's use the features of Cascadia Code as an example, that is the stuff they promote on their GitHub page:

G2 posted some fun logos for Kate on reddit.

I think they are nice and flashy and well suited if you want to show your appreciation for Kate and like that art style and a good addition to our awesome icon and mascot.

Static Version

Animated Version

Licensing

G2 licensed these files under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Feel free to share the stuff with this license and credit for G2.

So this is not quite an introduction since the plugin has been around for almost a year now, having been released in the 23.04 release but since I never got around to writing a blog about it, here I am.

In simple words, the formatting plugin allows one to format code easily and quickly. Well the "quickness" depends on the underlying code formatter but we try to be as quick as possible. So far if you wanted to do code formatting from within Kate, the only way to do that was to configure a tool in the External Tools plugin and then invoke it whenever you wanted to format the code. While this works it wasn't great for a few reasons. Firstly, you would loose undo history. Secondly, the buffer would jump and you would most likely loose your current position in the document. Thirdly, for every language you get a different tool and you need to remember the right tool to invoke on the right document type.

Current state of the port

Thanks to the help of our contributors the current state of Kate for the upcoming first Qt & KF 6 release looks very promising. This includes not just people working on Kate and KTextEditor/KSyntaxHighlighing, but all of KDE Frameworks and Qt.

I now use the KF 6 based version both at work and home exclusively after we switched the master branch over to that. So far, beside the natural issues that can occur using a branch under active development, nothing really did stick out as a blocking issue.

Let's take a look at the current state of the KDE e.V. published applications in the Microsoft Store.

Last 30 days statistics

Here are the number of acquisitions for the last 30 days (roughly equal to the number of installations, not mere downloads) for our applications:

• KDE Connect - Enabling communication between all your devices - 11,640 acquisitions

• Okular - More than a reader - 9,100 acquisitions

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Kate has been supported on Windows for a long time however, we missed one crucial feature on Windows that made it not as good as Kate on Linux. That feature was the built-in terminal. If you are a developer you might have to use the terminal a lot and having a built-in terminal inside your editor can be really helpful and convenient.

With 23.04, we have filled this gap. After a hectic weekend of 20+ hours of hacking on a borrowed windows machine and sacrificing a lot of other things, Kate now has a built-in terminal on Windows as well. The terminal we used is based on qtermwidget which is a fork of an older version of Konsole and uses ptyqt for pty. I had to make a lot of modifications to support the new terminal on Windows/Mac/Linux and make it build with Qt6 as well as Qt5 but now it is done and we merged it last night after some testing. There are going to be a lot of bugs for sure, but at least we now have a proper terminal to offer on Windows. Obligatory screenshot below:

Git support in Kate landed almost 2 years ago but so far it is undocumented. I am writing this article in order to fill this gap and hopefully make more people aware of the git related features that Kate has.

To be able to use git functionality you need to enable at least two plugins

• Project plugin (commit / status / branch compare / stashing / file history)
• Documents Plugin (file history)
• Git blame (git blame support)

Once the project plugin is enabled and you are in a git repository, you will have the git toolview in your left sidebar:

It's Halloween and the Kate and KWrite 22.12 release is approaching, so its about time we give you another update what we've been working on.

The Biggest Treat: Widgets

So far Kate was only able to display code views in Kate's central view component. In the upcoming release, Kate can also place arbitrary Qt Widgets there, which required making some bigger changes under the hood. You might ask how is this relevant at all, to which we answer: this change enabled us to implement a treat bag of cool, new features. Already we have used this to implement a welcome page, an improved git diff viewer and the configuration options now reside in a tab instead of a dialog.

The 22.08 release of Kate hasn't arrived for many users yet, but we already have new cool stuff for upcoming releases.

As our merge requests page shows, alone in August we got at least 66 new things done. Naturally that are not all new features, but bug fixes, too.

Pablo Rauzy was nice enough to provide some short videos for the enhancements he contributed! Thanks a lot for that, and thanks to all people that helped to work out the merge requests he submitted.

KDE Gear 22.08 Release in August

Next month the KDE Gear 22.08 release will arrive. Kate and KWrite are released with that collection of KDE software.

Thanks already to all people that make KDE Gear releases possible. I myself would not be able to release twice a year some proper version with patch releases, manage the i18n stuff, .... It is really a lot of work to get this done and I am very grateful to the KDE team members that take care of that! If you maintain some invent.kde.org hosted KDE application and want to have regular releases, I strongly suggest to join KDE Gear.