Kate/KTextEditor Picks Up Many Improvements To Enhance KDE Text Editing

Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements.

This KDE text editing code now has support for disabling syntax highlighting entirely if preferred. When using syntax highlighting, there have been many KTextEditor enhancements to improve the experience as well as improvements to the highlighting for a variety of languages from JavaScript to YAML to AppArmor files.

Scrolling has also been improved in KTextEditor-based applications so it's not jumpy when lines are wrapped. There also was a bug where Kate/KTextEditor applications would crash if replacing a new line at the end of a document with a space, which is now fixed.

Arguably most exciting is Kate/KTextEditor now supporting the display of inline notes/messages. This can allow for nifty features like displaying a color preview next to HTML/hex color codes, among other nifty features that have been supported by other text editors / IDEs for a while. See that awesome work at Kate-Editor.org.

Meanwhile KDE contributor Nate Graham has continued doing a great job providing weekly summaries of these enhancements via his blog. The KTextEditor enhancements are on the way for KDE Frameworks 5.50 and outside of these text editing improvements there is also a new scale effect coming to KDE Plasma 5.14, better red eye reduction within Gwenview, and various other enhancements.

Those curious about the Akademy 2018 Vienna conference happenings, they were summarized this past week on dot.kde.org.