Kate

From KDE Community Wiki

KDE’s text and code editor Kate has several User-fueled capabilities, i.e. plugins, scripts, and syntax highlighting definitions. This page should list external resources of those types.

Look here for more information about power-using Kate.

Plugins

As far as i know, all existing plugins are integrated into KDE and can be downloaded in most dirstribution as part of a package called “kate-plugins-extra” or similar.

Scripts

Kate’s JavaScript scripting capabilities allow to write autoindenters that take care of indentation while you type, and scripts for the internal command line. A tutorial is available here.

Syntax Highlighting

Kate’s syntax highlighting capabilites are a pretty nice feature, as the well-thought out XML syntax is easy to grasp and as expressive as XML can become: look here for a tutorial.

External schemes

Color role consolidation

In KDE 4.10, Kate gains color schemes. Unfortunately, many highlighting definitions still have hardcoded colors, which ignore the color scheme, and could clash visually. Some definitions have almost exclusively hardcoded colors (e.g. LaTeX), which clashes renders the color schemes to a mere background-color-changer.

Thus we decided to expand the set of available color roles, and eventually deprecate hardcoding colors here.

We should collect all color schemes’ hardcoded colors, together with a suggestion if we find a analogue color role, or want to create a new role for them (because there is no other way or many schemes want that role). I’ll start with just LaTeX:

LaTeX
I provide a full mapping to the existing types for now. let’s see if more languages need something comparable wit mathmode or sectioning, maybe we can then introduce new roles.
Keyword (role=dsNormal, color=#800000)
We should use dsFunction, as “Keyword” currently means just “LateX macro”
Math (role=dsNormal, color=#00A000)
We should use dsOthers, as Math mode is just “the other mode”.
Keyword Mathmode (role=dsNormal, color=#606000)
We should use the same as for “Keyword”, i.e. dsFunction
Structure (role=dsNormal, color=#F00000)
These are sectioning macros. We should use dsKeyword, as those are fixed Macro names. (=Keywords!)
For its children, “Structure Text”, “Structure Keyword”, “Structure Math”, “Structure Keyword Mathmode”, we should use the same as for their “Structure”-less variants in bold: dsNormal, dsFunction, dsOthers, dsFunction
Environment (role=dsNormal, color=#0000D0)
Those are Blocks, so why not dsRegionMarker?
Verbatim (role=dsNormal, color=#a08000)
Those are literals, so maybe dsString
Bullet (role=dsNormal, color=#FF00C4)
Those are unicode characters used by Kile as placeholders. They mess up my utf-8-documents, but if we keep them, why not dsWarning?
Ampersand (role=dsNormal, color=#002793)
dsChar, maybe?
Column Separator (role=dsNormal, color=#002793)
Those are the @{} things in table column specifications: dsDataType