It’s now almost seven years ago, during the creation of KDE4 with all the massive porting work, that on November 27th 2006 this email was sent to Laurent Montel, one of the main people pushing that port:

Hi Laurent, please don't spend too much effort at the old program KHexEdit, I am quite far

on the way to write a successor, called Okteta. Concerning feature

compatibility, so far I implemented around 60 % of the features of KHexEdit,

and hope to do the last 40 % until at least January. Yes, no code yet in SVN

(besides the library), but that will change in three weeks, promised.

[...]

As history has shown, things that time luckily worked out as planned, and there is now Okteta as hex editor based on the KDE4 platform. Even if it still misses 1 or 2 features from KHexEdit (but hopefully makes up for that with some new ones). 😉

Now it is porting time again, onto the new promising platform of Qt5/KF5. Myself I have so far only started into only looking into things, with this year’s Akademy being the first time to do at least a checkout of the Qt5 and KF5 sources.

Two days after the return from Akademy it was now me to receive an email, from Alexander Richardson, among other things the author of Okteta’s cool Structures tool, telling he had had a few spare days and had looked into how much work it is to port Okteta to Qt5/KF5. By simply doing it, see the branch kf5-port!

Ich hatte die letzten Tage ein bisschen Zeit und habe mal geschaut wie

aufwändig es ist Okteta auf Qt5/KF5 zu portieren.

[...]

So here is happily presented the very first public screenshot of Okteta on Qt5/KF5, brought to you by Alex, showing the raw internals of the executable Eclipse:



Alexander found that the porting was rather easy thanks to the KDE4Support module:

Ansonstens muss ich sagen, portieren ist ziemlich angenehm, dank KDE4Support

innerhalb eines Tages machbar. Die meisten Commits danach waren wegportieren

von KDE4Support.

So first porting to KDE4Support (he managed to do that in a day), and then seeing to resolve things to Qt5 or KF5 replacements step by step.

So if the days are again too hot outside, lock up yourself in the fridge and give a port of your program a try. And consider helping out the “busy bees” who have done so much great work already on converting kdelibs into the KDE Frameworks or Qt5, and do your small share of honey creation! (Yes, also telling that myself)

And if you need a sample program to play with Qt5/KF5, thanks to Alex work you can now use Okteta from the kf5-port branch (though you will need to apply a patch for a bug in Qt5 it exposes, which hopefully will get fixed soon, can anyone push that?).