How to help with Kate development

If you want to help us develop Kate, KWrite or KatePart, you should join our mailing list. Contacting us at #kate on irc.kde.org is also a good idea, we are always happy to help you get started.

How to Build Kate

Right now, you can build Kate very easily provided you use at least KDE 4.6. Click here for a quick howto. We are always happy about patches, just send them to our mailing list!

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. As a part of KDE, Kate benefits from the KDE as a whole, apart from the excellent integration provided by KDE the help from the KDE translation team is invaluable.

C/C++ Coding Standards

The code in ktexteditor.git and kate.git shall follow the style described for KDELIBS.

Coding Standards for Python Plugins

Besides delimiting blocks with 4 spaces, we do not have very strict rules for coding new Python plugins, basically having this kate variable line in your source files will do:

# kate: space-indent on; indent-; mixed-indent off;

In addition, most of us follow the PEP-8 style guide wherever appropriate. Who codes desides. If you are changing an existing plugin that follows the PEP-8 rules, please follow too.

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
multi-line C comments.

Good starting points

Good ideas what to look at first are:

• Our bugs in the KDE bugtracker
• Our wishes in the KDE bugtracker