Jakoblog ...home of jpetso

Yeah, you might have read about the AutoBrace KTextEditor plugin which I introduced two weeks ago on this blog. You might even have tried it out, but it didn't work for you because it crashed under certain circumstances, it messed up pasted text, it broke undo functionality and it didn't do additional indentation although that would have been useful. You know who to blame for all of these shortcomings! (Right, that would be me.)

But fear not! I found ways to fix all of these, and it now works brilliantly and without a glitch. Unlike last time, I'm now even using the plugin myself. And on top of that, I even created an Oxygen icon (yay!) to display in the "Extensions" listing:

Now this makes you want to use Kate (or KDevelop) with AutoBrace just sooo badly, doesn't it? Heh, I knew it.

Hi Planet KDE!

You might already know me from 2006 or 2007, but currently I'm gone from KDE because of other commitments. So technically you shouldn't hear from me right now; however, my buddy klausi drove me to it.

Surprising high amounts of KDE coders use non-KDE technology like vi or emacs to hack on KDE, and mostly they've got good reasons to do so. The only option to get those people use Kate or KDevelop is to continually improve those. The respective developer teams are doing awesome work in that regard, while my contribution for today is just a small KTextEditor plugin. (Which means you can use it in Kate, KDevelop or whatever KatePart-based editors exist out there.)

The plugin is called AutoBrace and, frankly, an uninspired clone of the best feature that you'll find in Eclipse (apart from the compile-as-you-go automatism and sheer infinite amounts of complexity). Right, it's the automatic insertion of a closing brace ("}") after you ended a line with an opening one ("{"). Kate's standard insertion of parentheses, brackets and braces is simply too obtrusive for me, so even if I tried it several times I always had to disable it again because I can't stand it. So here's how AutoBrace works.

1. You, the developer, are writing a line of code, and want to open a new block delimited by braces. Looks like this:

1. If you press Enter and AutoBrace is enabled, it will insert your favorite new brace where it belongs. Looks like this:

It's no big deal in the code - actually, I should be embarrassed to blog about such a minor thing when other people are continuously rocking KDE with stuff like SVG support in KHTML (new), a whole new power management solution for KDE (relatively new), or a window manager that's just terrific (not new, but still awesome).

But I've got no scruples, so here's your blog post anyways. You can get AutoBrace right now for your current Kate, you just need to compile it beforehand. Here is where I put it. See you some other time!