Kate

How to help with Kate development

If you want to help us developing Kate, KWrite or KatePart, you should join our mailing list. Contacting us at #kate at the freenode irc network is also a good idea, we are always happy to help you getting started.

Also, see the resource lists to the right for relevant resources.

Areas of work

The main work area is the programming, but if you are not a programmer you can help in many other areas:

• Write and maintain documentation.
• Write and maintain syntax highlight files.
• Write and maintain scripts.
• Maintain bug reports.
• Provide us with useful feedback.
• Help us by helping KDE (www.kde.org). As a part of KDE, Kate is benefitting from the KDE as a whole, apart from the excellent integration provided by KDE the help from the KDE translation team (http://i18n.kde.org) is invaluable.

Coding standards

We do not have very strict rules for code in the kate team, basically having this kate variable line in your source files will do:

kate: space-indent on; indent-width: 2; mixed-indent off;

In addition, most of us have a newline before the opening brace of blocks:

void KateSomething::foo()
{
  // I'll foo you
  while ( bar )
  {
     baz();
  }
}

Kate’s own C style indenter works nice for the code style we use in Kate code — surprise ;)

Documenting your code

We use Doxygen syntax to document code, and it’s nice to document everything, even private code, since other people than you might get to work on it or just try to understand it.

For comments inside of functions, C++ single-line comments are preferred over the multi-line C comments.