I don't blog too often, but several things happened during the last month and they are partly related to KDE as well. And as there is a short dot story now available, I would like to share something about the background of the story.

Some minutes ago a mail from Ian landed in my Inbox, where he asks if I would blog or write a "short one paragraph snippet" on how KNewStuff is used in Quanta. I don't really get where should I write that paragraph, that I can certainly blog here. Anyway, my PC is doing some video encoding using the nice DVD Rip-O-Matic application written in Kommander, so I have some free time. I have no idea if this will show up on planetkde.org or not though.

A while ago, it was questioned on kde-devel why was KFileReplace in the KDE WebDev package. The reasoning is that no one looking for that application specifically would think it was inside a web development package. The same holds true for Kommander. It is not really a web development tool, so it is kind of weird to have it in WebDev. Kommander has great potential. It is easy to use, and is getting even more powerful.

Being on holidays certainly gives you time to reflect on what new features you'd like in your text editor I've come up with something which I hope will help make using a text editor a better experience by providing more assistance to the user... input filtering.

I've been working on something pretty big for katepart for a while now, but it's just struck home how widely applicable this new idea will be for apps utilising the KTextEditor api.



The whole thing started when I was looking for a way to enable custom programmatic syntax highlighting. I first implemented a smart cursor which retained its relative location while the text around it was edited; then extended this into a pair of smart cursors to define a "range" of text. These objects give forth plenty of useful, convenient signals, such as changed(), moved(), etc. This looked like a promising way of implementing custom HL.

Many of your know I met Wil in July. I had heard last year that he really liked Quanta and mentioned it on his site so I wanted to meet him. Tonight was really a lot of fun! It's amazing how easy it is to just get into your own little world and sit at home when you're self employed. It's also fun to see just how interesting people you can meet are. Wil is really fun not because he's a celebrity but because he's Wil. This time we made the commitment to get there early enough to hear him read.

Hi everyone,

It's fun to have this platform for developers and so I thought I'd put forward
an idea I've been trying to promote for some time that seems to not get much
traction in the community. Often I get a request that reads like can you add
auto completion support for [your favorite scripting language here]? I
dilligently reply "I don't actually use that language and we have a policy
that these must be done by people who use them and can test them. However Quanta
is set up so that users can add a language using XML." Now, please allow me
some small degree of indulgence here... but isn't it weird that given these facts

• The program was free
• XML should be part of a web developer's toolbox and no big deal
• The idea of "community" means you'd think people would be both
  proud and anxious to do their part

Yet it is maybe one in four or less that will finally step up and put a few
hours into what is essentially making a tool their own. I'm not really surprised,
but I can't say I'm still not dissapointed.