Kate – New Features – August 2022
kate-editor.org
kate-editor.org
I already told my KDE story here [1;2;3]. Switching to Kate was one of the last steps to use almost exclusively KDE software (apart from Firefox and Thunderbird, and only taking GUI applications into account of course), but it was a bit difficult coming from Emacs. A few weeks ago I found a small and easy to fix bug in Kate. I reported it on the IRC channel, and was greeted with "why don't you fix that yourself?" as an answer… I replied that I do not have time for that, and was told that yes, nobody has the time… along with a link to Kate "Build it" page [4], which is basically a tutorial for KDE's very cool kdesrc-build script.
I had no prior experience with KDE frameworks, nor with Qt. I only did a little bit of C++ before but only in toy or class projects. But KDE code is quite clean, not that hard to understand, and the community is really helping with useful feedback on merge requests. A few hours later my first merge request was accepted, fixing that bug.
This gave me the opportunity to dig into Kate source code and become somewhat familiar with it, so it would have been dumb to stop there while at the same time there were features from Emacs that I did miss daily in Kate (sometimes I saved my document, opened it in Emacs, did the necessary editing in a few commands, and then came back to Kate…).
Well, now here we are, a few weeks later =).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032680
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28096509