kde

At the start of Kate’s indenting script for C/C++, the following options are available:

// BEGIN USER CONFIGURATION
var cfgIndentCase = true; // indent ‘case’ and ‘default’ in a switch?
var cfgIndentNamespace = true; // indent after ‘namespace’?
var cfgAutoInsertStar = false; // auto insert ‘*’ in C-comments
var cfgSnapSlash = false; // snap ‘/’ to ‘*/’ in C-comments
var cfgAutoInsertSlashes = false; // auto insert ‘//’ after C++-comments
// END USER CONFIGURATION

To set these options one would first have to actually find the indenting scripts under /usr/share, then copy it to one’s home directory to be able to modify it, and then modify the javascript source. This could – of course – be done in a much better way. In an ideal world options like these should be available in Kate’s settings as check boxes. It should also be possible to have non-boolean options, like choosing a value from a list of possible values for a setting.

I would love to see something like the following:

registerSetting(“Indent ‘case’ and ‘default’ in switch statements”, “cfgIndentCase”,  “boolean”);

produce

☑ Indent ‘case’ and ‘default’ in switch statements

in Kate’s settings.

I don’t have the time myself, but I don’t think it would be very hard, and I’m sure that many people would be a bit happier. Me and the other Kate developers would glady be of assistance. ☺

(Ok, not really.)

Kate’s maintainer, Christoph Cullmann, shared a funny story over a beer one of the first days here at GCDS.

In ye olden days, what is now Kate and Kwrite was one application called “KWrite – KDE’s Advanced Text Editor”. However, the author of Kwrite mysteriously disappeared. Christoph forked Kwrite and continued working on it and after some time it greatly surpassed Kwrite’s capabilities and was becoming more of a power tool. A name change was long overdue.
Being a good German, Christoph decided to name it after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, so in KDE 2.1 the editor “Kant” was born.
For some strange reason, probably easier to understand for native English speakers, it was renamed to “Kate” in KDE 2.2. And thus what still is KDE’s Advanced Text Editor was born.