Just to notify you all bug seekers out there not to file bugs against Lancelot in the Beta 1 of KDE 4.2 because most of them were fixed since the Beta 1 was tagged. If filing a new bug, please test whether it exists in the trunk.
Published
in the KDE development section,
on 24 November 2008
Brainstorming
I must say that the Lancelot brainstorm topic on KDE forums is a success. Thanks to everyone who decided to get involved, and a special thanks goes to Aaron for twitting about it (I guess that it brought a fair share of visitors).
Updates
As of today, Lancelot can (again) be considered stable enough (the trunk version that is) for daily usage. We are nearing KDE 4.2, which in Lancelot’s terms mean that we are nearing the 1.5 version. Although it is a .x upgrade to 1.0 that was released for KDE 4.1 in September this year, it is far from being a minor update. I can freely say that it now has all the features that I need* :). Now, there is only a matter of getting used to being able to use it without the mouse at all (I’ve got used to having to click on the search result to activate it instead of just pressing Enter).
this is one of the reasons i decided to create the brainstorm topic - it is easier just to ask you what you want, than to guess :)
Issues
I said ‘stable enough’, not perfect, so there are a couple of items I need to fix. For example, the scrollbars in the application browser sometimes show up in a wrong place (no, I’ll restrain myself of commenting on QGV layouting mechanisms and quirks).
The second is a problem related to theming of the parts applet - the scrollbars are not shown in the part applet (that is, they are shown as 1 pixel wide lines) because there is no theme for them yet. I will probably use the default scrollbars from the Plasma theme for the parts applet (not for the menu though).
Since I have received so many complaints because “Lancelot doesn’t follow/obey/… Plasma theme”, and I am tired of pointing the people to the FAQ, I decided to make the necessary files needed by Lancelot for all Plasma themes that ship with plasma-addons package.
I’ve started a topic on KDE forums where you can enter all your wishes related to Lancelot. I think it is far better place than the comments section in blog posts.
Published
in the Other section,
on 16 November 2008
Although this is not much related to KDE, or at all in fact, I decided to post it on my KDE development blog simply because there are so many KDE (and other) developers using Vim as their main (and only) IDE.
As I said earlier, I am a Vim fan, and I can not see that it will change in the foreseeable future. But, I have to say that, although I don’t find it a complete replacement of Vim’s Project plugin, that Quick Browser of Qt Creator is a very nifty feature.
So, I decided to start writing a Vim script which will emulate the Quick Browser behaviour. And so it started. The first version was a proof of concept one and it was designed so that the quick browser showed its results in a side panel (just as the Project plugin does).
And it worked quite fast.
The problem was that the Project, Code Navigator and my Quick Browser couldn’t work together very well - each one wanted it’s own window/buffer. So, I decided to start writing a simple Python (yes, Vim now supports Python scripting) framework that allows multiple plugins (called runners - took the name from Plasma/KRunner and I’m not ashamed) which are based on that framework to work together in harmony.
The project waits approval at SourceForge under the name Vide (obviously short for Vim - IDE). Currently only Quick Browser runner exists, but I’ll add more later.
Project management
And, that’s not all. There will be project meta-data which will allow you to define different build tools (cmake and qmake come to mind), …, and everything else I come up with… Since I’m bored and have to take my dog for a walk, this is all for now. So stay tuned.