I’m back from Akademy, and I can’t wait to share some of the cool stuff that happened there over the past week. I’m going to post the video of my talk as soon as it’s up. But first, I know what you’re all really waiting for: this week’s Usability & Productivity update. Though we were all quite busy, somehow everyone managed to accomplish an enormous amount of work, too!

In particular there has been a momentous amount of improvement to Kate and the code that underpins it: the Syntax Highlighting and KTextEditor frameworks. These frameworks are used to provide text editor views to the Kate, KWrite, KDevelop, and Kile apps, so any improvements to them are felt very widely within the universe of KDE apps. I want to recognize the efforts of Christoph Cullmann, Dominik Haumann, Kåre Sårs, and Sven Brauch for their stunning amount of work. While I was working on this post Tuesday night, there was a time when I was literally (not figuratively, I mean literally literally) unable to document the improvements as fast as they would show up in my email inbox. These guys deserve the community’s respect for the stunning quantity of work they performed in an astonishingly small amount of time. Let’s give ’em all a round of applause.

But that’s not all! Take a look at the full list, which includes many, many more nice improvements:

New Features

Kate (and other apps using the KTextEditor frameworks, like KDevelop) now has the ability to turn off Syntax highlighting entirely, if desired (Christoph Cullmann, KDE Frameworks 5.50)

Kate (and other apps using the KTextEditor frameworks, like KDevelop) now has the ability to display inline notes and messages. Expect this feature to enable some really, really awesome possibilities in the future! (Michal Srb and Sven Brauch, KDE Frameworks 5.50)

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.