Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

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 :)

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8 Comments

  1. Felix

    Hi
    This is an excellent idea, I’m looking forward to finding some time and trying it out.

  2. Hi there!

    Nice to finally see some shots of PlasMate. If you are interested and have, time – why not attend the Kate/KDevelop hacksprint in 2010? See:

    http://www.doodle.com/vkyh9up9794zr4s8

  3. Jason "moofang"

    @ Milian Wolff: Hi! Thanks for the invitation, but Berlin is just a little too far out of reach for me (I currently live in Singapore) :)

  4. illissius

    The integrated, magical ‘transparent’ git support is an awesome idea. Couldn’t the same infrastructure be reused to support some kind of collaborative editing?

    Also, have you guys considered cooperating with KDevelop? It seems like both projects have ideas and features which could benefit the other.

  5. Hi there, and welcome to the KDE community! Keep up the good work and if you ever need anything from the Promo team don’t hesitate to let us know :)

  6. Jason "moofang"

    @ illissius: About collaboration, don’t think so, at least not in the near future. Pushing a project online (to GHNS) on one end and then importing it on another end into a local project to be worked on will be possible at some point, but we don’t presently have any plans for project collaboration a ‘la revision control systems. Also no at the moment re:KDevelop. I think what we’re trying to do with PlasMate is fundamentally different from what KDevelop is and should be. We’re in fact going out of our way to avoid calling PlasMate an IDE ;)

    @ Justin: Hi! And thanks :)

  7. illissius

    What I meant is merely that things like the transparent revision control could be useful in KDevelop, while KDevelop’s semantic code-understanding foo could be useful in Plasmate. Not any kind of convergence.

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