PlasMate update (and hello Planet KDE!)

Here, have a screenshot of PlasMate as it is on svn now :)

Firstly, if nothing goes wrong, this post should find itself on Planet KDE, so I guess I should do a quick self-introduction. I’m Jason “moofang” Lim Yuen Hoe. A ‘newbie’, you could say, inching his way towards being a proper KDE contributor :) Right now I’m sticking mostly around the Plasma team, and am focusing my free time on developing PlasMate, the Plasmoid development tool planned for (but I have no idea if it will make) KDE 4.4. Also, I should probably note here that I have been keeping a loose record of my work on PlasMate in my old blog, but that one got blown into cyber-atoms by my previous web host, so kindly excuse me for starting awkwardly in the middle of nowhere here. Moral of the story: never entrust free hosts with your data. Ever.

Back to PlasMate, I noted last time that I’ve gotten the autosave and previewing down, such that the previewer always works seamlessly with the editor and previews the latest state of the code on refresh, and the user never needs to worry about losing data or even think about saving, since all of that is done magically behind the scenes. I’ve added in a number of stuff since, let’s take a look.

Firstly it is now possible to add and remove files in a project. The previously useless ‘New’ entry in the editor tree now asks for a filename on-click a’la creating new files in dolphin/konqueror:

I’ve also added right-click context menus for the relevant editor tree entries to enable deletion:

The editor tree responds to these changes and updates itself automatically. The code editor itself has seen some improvements thanks to Aaron. Notably from the screenshots – it now shows line numbers. It also now makes its backup files hidden so they don’t show up in the editor tree and be a nuisance. (They still show up in the screenshots here because my trunk is currently broken, so these are running on 4.3 in which the fix doesn’t work :( ).

Finally I’ve added a new publishing widget, that can be used to export the current plasmoid into an installable .plasmoid file, to directly install the current plasmoid into the current system, and to push the plasmoid straight online to Get Hot New Stuff:

A little on the ugly side, I know :P But this is just a stub to get me working for now. We’ll probably make it look nicer before long. I’ve gotten the ‘export’ part and the ‘install’ part working, while the ‘publish online’ part would probably need to wait for our git expert Diego :)

That’s about it in the way of ‘feature’ additions for now. I’ve also done a good bit of fixing, notably making importing external projects and switching to a new project from an existing one work. Of course, all this is still at development stage and nothing is fixed and everything is subject to change and all that. Next step would probably be for me to start getting my feet wet with implementing a documentation widget. Sounds like fun :)