The KDE Project yesterday announced the release of KDE 3.1 RC 1. This release, while important, will have but a short lifespan (RC 2 is scheduled for next Monday), and so binary packages are not planned. More info at the Dot.
KDE 3.1 RC1: Ready for a Short Test Drive
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Apparently, there are a lot of new fixes in this RC. My favorite is a new word-wrapping mode for Kate that follows the indentation of an XML file. I’ve been waiting for a tool like that for awhile now. Also, the new liquid 0.96 style is out, and requires KDE 3.1 beta2 or higher.
Now, where’s those ebuilds?
>new liquid 0.96 style is out.
Yuck. I prefer Keramic 100 times over it (and I don’t even like Keramic all that much).
Or you don’t like the new version? To tell the truth, I’m partial to Keramik myself, because it’s not another OS X knock-off. In all, though, I like the crystal-ish themes a lot more than the “solid” themes like BlueCurve or LightStyle. The real nice thing about both Kermik and Liquid, though, is that it adapts to your color scheme. I abhor the default color schemes that come with most themes, and don’t have the artists blood (or the patience) to edit the themes myself. As far as I can tell, no GTK+ theme can yet do this dynamic color adaptation, which is an advantage for Qt/KDE.
My wife is very partial to the combo of using liquid to as the style and then using keramik as the window decoration.
However, she has decided that as Rayiner Hashem menitoned Bluecurve with the more solid appearance is her very favorite.
You can get the Bluecurve QT themes by downloading Garnome and compiling the red-hat-artwork stuff.
I don’t like Liquid at all. I mostly find myself using Bluecurve for both Red Hat and Mandrake. I use the native Keramic on SuSE. And I use my own design (I hacked the .Net theme for Qt some months ago) on my Gentoo/KDE.
I use Red Hat 8.0 with Keramik widgets, Liquid window decoration, and the Windows95 color scheme. The Win95 scheme makes the widgets a very dark grey, which helps text to stand out on my laptop. The Keramik and Liquid color themes are both much too bright IMO.
Is it just my machines or does the window menu (Alt+F3) not close when you double-click it? This works on every other theme and I wish it worked for Keramik.
This is a Metacity behavior
>>”Is it just my machines or does the window menu (Alt+F3) not close when you double-click it? This works on every other theme and I wish it worked for Keramik.”
It just worked for me … remember, Keramik isn’t even meant to be in general usage. It’s part of KDE 3.1 and the Keramik packages floating around now (except maybe the one in RH 8.0 and the customized Keramik in SuSE 8.1) are technically beta quality, right? Or has it been officially released?
This was using KDE 3.1b2 so it should have worked better than it does on 3.0x
>>”This was using KDE 3.1b2 so it should have worked better than it does on 3.0x”
Not necessarily, since it might be a problem with the KDE beta itself in that case.
I don’t have time to compile this release. Does KDE finally have soft word wrap like every other desktop environment? This has been on my list of most irksome UNIX-related bugs.
If it is soft word wrap (not like the crappy letter wrap that Emacs and GNOME use) which fits with line indentation, this should put us ahead of the other guys (Windows, Mac, etc.)
Can someone tell me if my hopes are justified?
tia,
antiphon
I have problems with wrapping using the 3 KDE editors too (KEdit, KWrite, Kate). It just doesn’t work well. I mostly find myself using Gedit most of the time because of this problem. But Gedit has other problems…
I’m not a programmer, so the only time I ever use an editor is for config files, which I usually edit with jed or pico anyway.
I’m gonna go fire up some GUI editors and see if I can figure out what you guys are talking about …
… that didn’t take long. I tried Kate, which has a “Word Wrap” option, but it breaks the line. I don’t get it … Windows Notepad has been able to soft-wrap for years and it’s a pitiful little thing. Kate = K Advanced Text Editor. What’s the deal?
So tell me Rob old boy, did you grab it off the cvs “head” tree?
since I do believe that if you dloaded stock release Kate you wouldnt get that _new_ function.
btw.
im compiling kde 3.1 of the head tree now
The soft word wrap in the kate part isn’t (I guess) considered ready yet so instead of being configurable in the kate-part configuration pane, it’s a menu item. It has to be turned on and off for each file. And since it’s not attached to a KAction yet, other apps which embed kate-part don’t see it yet.
I’m sure this will be ironed out before 3.1 final; hell, it might be available right now, as I’m running 3.1 beta2.
Nonetheless, in my opinion, it works beautifully, but I’ve only used it for turning massive amounts of openoffice html export (about 100 pages, seriously) into cleaner html.
As somebody who’s used kate for thousands and thousands of hours — from writing code, to writing html, to javascript to css to configuration file editing and so on, I can say it’s a very good text editor. not perfect, but very good.
My Kate has word wrap but it’s hard-wrap, not soft-wrap. I’m using the stock Red Hat KDE implementation.
It is not just Kate. KWrite and KEdit doesn’t work well either.
I think at least Kwrite and Kate are using the same editor “engine”.
Kate just uses it in a kind of enhanced mode.
I use the native Keramic on SuSE. And I use my own design (I hacked the .Net theme for Qt some months ago) on my Gentoo/KDE.
Whoa. I think everyone’s missed the real story here…
That is – can we get Eugenia to package her hacked theme and make it available for us to test-drive? At the very least, how about a screenshot?
As far as I can tell, no GTK+ theme can yet do this dynamic color adaptation, which is an advantage for Qt/KDE.
This is coming soon: http://developer.gnome.org/news/summary/2002_October20-October26.ht…
No Unix text editor that I have ever seen (and I know of at least 25) has had this basic ability that Windows Notepad has had since about version 2.0.
Yes, it is rather pathetic on our part but hopefully the K folks have remedied this sorry state of affairs.
Nedit has had soft-wrap for years, and the GNOME2 version of gEdit has it, too.
The new Liquid looks better than the old, from the screenshots, but still quite ugly. I mean, especially when you compare with Mac OS X, Liquid looks….. ewwwww….. No offence Mosfet.
I am away from my Linux PCs right now and cannot verify what you said, however, I suspect that the GNOME 2.x way of soft wrapping is the same way that they did it for GNOME 1.x, which I have already discussed.
Nedit, I can’t stand but I will have to double check this when I get back later today.
but I want to see Eugenia’s hacks. How about posting it to kde-look.org? Pretty please?
Well, you were right about GNOME 2.x and NEdit. I’m sorry I questioned you but too many other people did not read what I initially posted and recommended apps I had already talked about that I thought you had done the same. My mistake :}
I still don’t like NEdit, though.