Okteta going for KDevelop (and Kate?)

While there already is a KPart from the hex editor Okteta, which can be embedded e.g. into Konqueror, but also KDevelop, it is only used Read-Only. More, the KPart system does not enable mulitple views on the same document, so in KDevelop having two views opened for a file, like with a splitted view area, also means two copies of the document in the working memory. Which also results in synchronisation problems, if you do (if you could) changes in each of the views. All this is part of my motivation for the Kasten framework. But until that is done, real life demands pragmatical solutions. Like manually writing plugins for the individual frameworks, e.g. for Sublime/KDevPlatform, if going for KDevelop integration.

And having good integration of Okteta in KDevelop, with all tools and whistles, has been something I often wanted to have. What better can I do than joining a bunch of KDeveloper developers for some days, for first-class coding support? Like at the current Kate-KDevelop sprint in Berlin? Organized by Milian Wolff, and with support from the KDE e.V. and the Physics faculty of the FU Berlin, I am now happy to sit between the Kate and the KDevelop code crunchers (“Let’s remove this!”, “Yeah”, “No”, …) since three days.

Being attached to a big network first shortly distracted me, because there are a lot of devices with a lot of unknown services announced in the service description systems like zeroconf/DNS-SD. Just look at the number of printers:

It also gave me an idea for a new heuristic to guess the type of device: One with a lot of unknown services must be an iPhone, as each iPhone app seems to invent a new custom network service, with a custom protocol. I do not think the network:/ kio-slave will ever be able to and should support all of them.

After being distracted I returned to my initial target, and with the help of Alexander (adymo) , Niko (nsams) and Aleix (apol) the Okteta plugin for KDevelop is already at the state of the Okteta KPart and better. Just the tools need some more work, as the Kasten framework does not match the KDevPlatform/Sublime framework here, so the wrapper for the tools are a little more complicated to be done. But look doable. Screenshot at last:

And yes, Okteta as a stand-alone program is going to stay.