kde

The Kate lsp branch contains now the infrastructure as used by Qt Creator. In addition, clangd is now somehow started in a working state for the first project opened inside Kate. For example, if you use the CMake Kate project generator and you compile Kate from the “lsp” branch, clangd should pick up the compile_commands.json for a CMake generated Kate project. ;=) Unfortunately not much more than starting and informing clangd about the open workspaces (for the first opened project) works ATM....

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) allows the integration of stuff like code completion, jump to definition, symbol search and more into an application without manual re-implementation for each language one wants to support. LSP doesn’t fully allow an integration like KDevelop or Qt Creator do with the libclang based tooling aimed for C/C++ but on the other side offers the possibility to interface with plenty of languages without a large effort on the client side....

As you can read in the official Creator 4.9.0 release announcement, Qt Creator now uses the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework for providing the generic highlighting. This is a nice step for the wider adoption of this MIT licensed part of the KDE Frameworks. And this is not just an one-way consumption of our work. The framework got actively patches back that make it more usable for other consumers, too, like Kate ;=)...

During my web site upgrade, I reviewed the old stuff I had hosted on my long gone web sites but still archived here locally. An interesting thing I stumbled on are the KDE 3 -> 4 porting screenshots of Kate I saved in 2005. They actually show pretty nicely how far we have gone since 2005 with our development stack. The KDE 3 -> 4 transition was a large hassle. It did take weeks of work just to get Kate back into an usable state....