Okteta Qt5/KF5-port: now free of kde4support

Racing close to Kate/KTextEditor on the way to Qt5/KF5 fields , the port of Okteta to Qt5/KF5 now crossed the lane and moved out of “KDE4” terrain as well, by no longer depending on kde4support.
Of course also with zero compiler warnings during build (with build.kde.org settings) and all existing tests succeeding (to follow the environment-friendly standards set by Kate’s developers 😉 ), as can be now also nicely seen on Okteta’s framework builds on build.kde.org (Thanks to the ever-awesome Ben for settings things up).

As you might remember, Alexander started the port last summer and has ever since been in the feedback cycle of KF5 and Okteta as well as other KF5 porting work (Note that the Qt5/KF5 port of Okteta has meanwhile moved to a branch named
frameworks, for consistency with the other repos).

Shifting priorities I finally managed to join his efforts (jumping on the moving train, eh), just right in time to “steal” him the milestone commit “Remove KDE4Support, no longer needed”, pardon Alex 😉 , at least crediting you here.

So what is up next? Of course giving lots of feedback to the KDE Frameworks 5, as there is quite some work left to do. From simple things like incomplete CamelCase forwarding headers to platform integration issues, e.g. the filedialog ignoring the QFileDialog::FileMode set and also blocking user input after cancelling or QFontDatabase::systemFont(QFontDatabase::FixedFont) not delivering a font with fixed width.
And then thinking about adding the Okteta widgets libraries to KDE Frameworks 5. The KHexEdit Interfaces were not integrated into KF5, because the original reason for having them instead of proper libs in kdelibs was to not bloat kdelibs for just a few possible users of a hex edit widget. That reason is gone with KF5. Just, I am not yet sure about the API, and KF5 would require a stable one. So in case you are interested in Qt5/KF5 hex edit widgets, ping me and tell me your requirements (find my email address in Okteta’s file headers or the About dialog).
More, my playground project Kasten finally needs to get pushed forward and possibly soon into a repo of its own. More core/UI splitting, QML variants etc are now to do, the core/widget splitting in KF5 help here a lot. Then proper async behaviour and more. Long TODO list there.
And from Qt5/KF5 terrain besides the obvious usual target OSes also Sailfish OS, even Ubuntu Touch can be seen on the horizon, so program variants for those might be interesting. And whatever other platform can be reached from there. (Yes, you just do not yet know you might need a hex editor there 😛 )
So much for the current dreams 😉

The roadmap draft sees as first Qt5/KF5-based release of Okteta the version 0.14 (released “when it is ready”).
Means, there will be another, final Qt4/kdelibs4-based version of Okteta before, 0.13, to be released as part of KDE Apps 4.13 this summer, possibly having 1-2 small features added.

Lots to do. But by using KDevelop everything seems easy possible 🙂

Okteta ported to Qt5/KF5

It’s now almost seven years ago, during the creation of KDE4 with all the massive porting work, that on November 27th 2006 this email was sent to Laurent Montel, one of the main people pushing that port:

Hi Laurent,

please don't spend too much effort at the old program KHexEdit, I am quite far
on the way to write a successor, called Okteta. Concerning feature
compatibility, so far I implemented around 60 % of the features of KHexEdit,
and hope to do the last 40 % until at least January. Yes, no code yet in SVN
(besides the library), but that will change in three weeks, promised.
[...]

As history has shown, things that time luckily worked out as planned, and there is now Okteta as hex editor based on the KDE4 platform. Even if it still misses 1 or 2 features from KHexEdit (but hopefully makes up for that with some new ones). 😉

Now it is porting time again, onto the new promising platform of Qt5/KF5. Myself I have so far only started into only looking into things, with this year’s Akademy being the first time to do at least a checkout of the Qt5 and KF5 sources.

Two days after the return from Akademy it was now me to receive an email, from Alexander Richardson, among other things the author of Okteta’s cool Structures tool, telling he had had a few spare days and had looked into how much work it is to port Okteta to Qt5/KF5. By simply doing it, see the branch kf5-port!

Ich hatte die letzten Tage ein bisschen Zeit und habe mal geschaut wie
aufwändig es ist Okteta auf Qt5/KF5 zu portieren.
[...]

So here is happily presented the very first public screenshot of Okteta on Qt5/KF5, brought to you by Alex, showing the raw internals of the executable Eclipse:

Alexander found that the porting was rather easy thanks to the KDE4Support module:

Ansonstens muss ich sagen, portieren ist ziemlich angenehm, dank KDE4Support
innerhalb eines Tages machbar. Die meisten Commits danach waren wegportieren
von KDE4Support.

So first porting to KDE4Support (he managed to do that in a day), and then seeing to resolve things to Qt5 or KF5 replacements step by step.

So if the days are again too hot outside, lock up yourself in the fridge and give a port of your program a try. And consider helping out the “busy bees” who have done so much great work already on converting kdelibs into the KDE Frameworks or Qt5, and do your small share of honey creation! (Yes, also telling that myself)

And if you need a sample program to play with Qt5/KF5, thanks to Alex work you can now use Okteta from the kf5-port branch (though you will need to apply a patch for a bug in Qt5 it exposes, which hopefully will get fixed soon, can anyone push that?).

Happy to have had been at Akademy 2013

Plannings for the travel were complicated & two weeks before the event things looked too expensive. But I had my talk in the program and also I just wanted to go. So I decided to try harder and then found an acceptable solution, which included renting a flat from private together with my good work-mate Jos, right across the stadium on the other side of the river.

And I am so happy I went! It was a very good time in Bilbao, I have to join the choir of those that are cheering up the organizers, helpers and sponsors:
Thank you/Eskerrik asko!

Bilbao & environment is really a nice spot, additionally the weather was perfect and the local food was so tasty. Then lots of interestings topics in the program and meeting people once again in real world. And everything well organized and cared for. Even the travel was without any missed connections or other issues. So completely happy Akademy time.

Had to deal with a challenge I did not expect: to jump on the daytrip into the water from a harbour wall, from above my height fear trigger level. Nice idea for a first time ever contact with the Atlantic ocean, I will remember that. Seeing how much fun especially Milian was having on his uncounted jumps helped me to conquer my fear 2 times for the final step/jump over the edge into the void, to be accelerated endlessly before splashing into the surprising salty water 🙂
It surely was interesting for the locals to see that flock of international people invade the harbour walls and then act like murres, throwing themselves into the water again and again from the height.

Another jump in new waters I did with my talk about the Kasten framework I am developing under the hoods of Okteta. So far I only had hinted at the framework in some blog posts here, because it has been still rather in initials states and changing all the time and there are quite some shortcuts in the code to make Okteta working as expected and not exposing the rough internals. Initially, when proposing the talk in spring, I had planned to get the QML parts of Kasten ready in time for the talk, so the value of Kasten might be even more visible already. But well, some life threads with higher priority required my resources more often 🙂 So QML in Kasten is postponed for now. Still I am happy to have shown off some of the ideas behind Kasten and a little the current state of the implementation, because it meant getting more serious with it for me, and some first feedback was also collected. With all the talk about Qt5/KF5 I also decided after the talk to skip further development of Kasten on Qt4/KDELibs4, unless needed for some new features of Okteta, and go straight to Qt5/KF5 as platform, soon also in an own repository outside of Okteta’s.

And because one talk is not enough, I happened to help out in a replacement talk that Jos did just before mine, doing some promotion for the OpenDocument Format. We of course did not let slip by the opportunity to demo the related latest cool thing we have been doing at our company KO GmbH, realtime collaborative editing of ODT documents in the browser with WebODF. That was a really good experience to see lots of people from the audience log in to the editing session and showing their creativity (e.g. in placing ads*), first time outside of my working chair 🙂
* One really needs spam filters everywhere, sigh… 😉

Also cool was to see the first time in live how an artist is using Krita, in Timothées talk about cool new features for comics and animation work in Krita. Looked so unbelievable naturally in use, no problems, everything just worked during his talk. Really nice. He, that has also small code snippets from me somewhere 🙂

Another pretty interesting thing was the BoF about QmlWeb, which sadly was only on Friday, so not a lot people were present. Doing webpages in QML terms looked definitely attractive, Anton did a nice ad-hoc demo in the BoF. These days QmlWeb also became a KDE Project, for now in playground. Welcome!

Kevin Krammer’s talk about Declarative Widgets was another talk to catch my attention for the complete time and after, using QML and still QWidgets is definitely attractive. In a discussion the next day Kevin also recommended me to use QML for my Kasten framework, given that the QML engine happily works with any objects that are QObject. And a declarative definition of Kasten-based programs/modules is what I would like to support one day as well.

Learned the hard way that one has to/should register for any (sub-)events, to make sure also any goodies can be received (and this one would have been really useful to me in the next month for Kasten experiments, too bad). Then, do I really, really need it? Perhaps less is more… At least if it is about people who store my email account details 😉

Saturday after Akademy I learned on a trip to the beach “Barinatxe” as recommended by our flat-owner (BTW, also awesome from the Akademy organizers to have got free metro tickets for everyone, for the complete tracks) that beaches can be too hot for more reasons than what you(?) would think: the sand was simply too hot to go bare-footed on it more than a few meters, possibly due to his rather dark color. And one needed a thicker towel to stay laying there with comfort. Funny to see all the people always running from their place into the water.

Found a small shell on the daytrip, that will remind me a little longer here on my desktop of this really fine Akademy. Well done, everyone!

Name needed for single-doc-per-window Okteta variant?

Wuuuush – and DesktopSummit is over. What, already? I would like some more weeks of this kind! Although being slightly ill, I still enjoyed it as much as possible. A big “Thank you!” also from me to all the organizers, helpers and supporters!

While hearing and seeing and talking about a lot of interesting things, I also managed to use the time to push that simple hex editor named Okteta, or rather the component system named Kasten it is based on, a little further, so the difference between a so-called “Multiple document interface” (MDI) and a “Single document interface” (SDI) is almost only by the set of used components in the code. I am actually in the camp of the people disliking the MDI approach, as it can be considered a non-integrated workspace in a workspace, so pretty much broken. The SDI variant of Okteta provides all the tools and features of the MDI variant, just the tools Filesystem and Documents and the related entries in the menu have been removed/are not added.

But this poses a question:
Should this be just a difference in the settings? Or should this variant instead be shown as a different program, like users see Kate and KWrite as different programs?
For some reasons I guess these should be two different programs, but then I need a new name for the SDI variant 🙂 Or should the MDI version be renamed, e.g. to “Okteta Studio” or similar?
Please post/discuss proposals in the comments, or send me your idea by email (see About dialog of Okteta)!
Final code is not yet commited to the central repo, needs some cleanup/finishing and also depends on the decision above, so sorry, cannot yet be tried out (but then besides MDI vs. SDI there is also nothing else new to see yet).

During the Desktop Summit it was interesting to hear how many people actually already have made use of Okteta. Thank you, good to know Kasten code to work in real life 😛
I even was told feature requests on the hall ways. The one late on the last day was even easy to do, it was having a sane default count of bytes per line, which would be 16, without an adaption to the current view width. That was fixed by a single line addition and quickly tested and commited, so at least an Italian user will be more happy with 0.7.1 🙂

All new Okteta features for KDE Apps 4.7 in a picture

KDE Apps 4.7 is out, and with it the hex editor Okteta 0.7!

For 0.6 and 0.5 I missed to give updates, like done for 0.4, 0.3, and 0.2.

So what is new since 0.4?

Not that much as in the early versions, since life has been busy for both Alex and me. So the biggest issues are yet to be solved: no smart handling of very large files (still completely loaded into memory), no storing of bookmarks. But besides that there is still nice progress:

(Eh, small glitch with the otherwise awesome new KWin in KDE Workspaces 4.7 is that shadows are not working for non-Oxygen styles, please ignore)

First thing to notice (besides the very first start of the program after updating to 0.7):

• much faster program start-up thanks to Alex’ analysis and improvements
  (what, you cannot see this in the picture? 😛 )

Other stuff:

• More support for char encoding/decoding:
  • New charset conversion tool: rewrites the bytes so the respective chars are the same as with the other charset
    (only 8-bit charsets supported, and unmatched chars are currently substituted with a value hardcoded to 0, setting is disabled)
  • New encodings: ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-16, Codepage 874
  • Fixed: show bytes without a defined chars as such
    (missed before that some of the supported charsets are incomplete)
• Many improvements in the Structures tool by Alex:
  • Structure definitions can now also be “described” in JavaScript (see the manual)
  • Begin of a structure can be pinned to a specific offset
  • Structure definitions can be installed using KNewStuff directly e.g. from kde-files.org
  • Support for strings (various Unicode encodings) in definitions
• New formats available for “Export to file”/”Copy as”:
  • Base32 (classic, Base32Hex, z-base-32)
  • Base85 (Ascii85 for now)
  • Uuencoding (historical, Base64)
  • Xxencoding
  • S-Record (16,24,32-bit address size)
  • Intel Hex (8,16,32-bit address size)
• Added embedded terminal
  (might be useless to most, but only needed a few code lines to implement 🙂 )
• Menu entries to set the count of bytes per line and per grouped bytes
• File info tool now estimates the mimetype also for the unstored/edited data in the working memory
• Bytearray views and tools are updated on change of default fixed font in System Settings

Oh, and headers for the Okteta libs and Kasten libs are finally installed since version 0.5, including the Qt Designer plugin. So if you are interested to make use of these libs in your own code, see for Kasten and OktetaKasten e.g. this blog entry (hm, Binspekt code needs updating to current API, will not compile) and the code of the plugin for KDevelop, for the Qt Designer plugin this blog entry and the example code.
But beware: the next version of the libs, coming with Okteta 0.8, will already have a different API/ABI, but that will be protected by proper namespacing.

For future versions there are still plenty of ideas for Okteta left, let’s see what gets realized 🙂

So for now “Happy bytes peeping and pushing!” also with the 0.7 version of Okteta!

Okteta and Kasten on MeeGo

Having been caught by some cold two weeks ago, I was still lucky to have recovered enough in time to go to the MeeGo conference in Dublin, sponsored by my employer openismus GmbH, joining a bunch of my colleagues. It was a really great conference, will be a nice challenge e.g. to match it with the Desktop Summit in Berlin next year (remember the date, August 6-12th). Having arrived there the evening before, we added our part to the success by helping out with putting up the large stickers to the windows, which gave directions and set MeeGo theming to the rooms (Openismus – your (now) also experts in applying large stickers to windows).

It was nice to see how many of the people on the floors were real life animations of the avatar images on Planet Gnome and Planet KDE. And even more great to see and hear KDE oldie and now director of the AMD Operating System Research Center, Chris Schläger, announcing that AMD is going to join the MeeGo project. Things are getting together which ought to get together!

A very welcome idea of Nokia and Intel to improve the motivation of the people to contribute to the MeeGo project was the give-away of a Lenovo ideapad for each conference participant. While the MeeGo Netbook release 1.1 is still anything but capable to make use of the multitouch feature of the ideapad’s screen, it for sure will be a nice device to experiment with new UI principles.

Which I am looking forward to do. While the work on my experimental Kasten framework has pretty much stalled this year, I hope I can pick that up again once my transition to Berlin has been completed (which could have been more smooth 😦 ). At least I took two days off and joined the KDE Mobile sprint starting the day after the MeeGo conference, hosted by KDAB in their Berlin office, thanks to them (incl. the delicious orange-tiramisu on sunday from Till’s wife’s birthday party, even if it was just a left-over 🙂 ). While I happened to be part of the team which started the profile-oriented modulization of kdelibs at Tokamak 4 in the begin of this year, my only real contribution so far has been to propose (talk is cheap 😛 ) the removal of the deprecated api+code for the “mobile” profile, to help a little in shrinking the size of the packages of the KDE Platform/Framework, then lost track of this topic in general. The more I was surprised now how much has been done already, great effort by whoever was involved (mostly Kevin Ottens, I guess?).

With no real touch UI oriented code for Okteta and Kasten yet (okteta-mobile is mainly main() atm 😉 ) I used the sprint to join the “porting” efforts to MeeGo, which is basically rpm packaging. And removing some deprecated stuff here and there, as the kdelibs packages for now are created using the Mobile profile, thus having none of the deprecated APIs, quite nice to see how clean all the code is already regarding usage of these. Of course I worked on the packaging of kdeutils and also kdesdk, now that Okteta is part of kdesdk. The few hidden deprecated calls left in Okteta were quickly patched away, and there is was running on my new ideapad:

Sure, nothing as useful and shiny as others are doing, but then Kasten still has way to go 🙂 Hopefully there soon will be long and cold winter nights and a new flat in Berlin. I know what I will do!

And while it is great to see GTK and now Qt being used and developed by the top companies, it is even greater to see other UI related FLOSS making their way into normal industry products as well, including upstream contributions, e.g. EFL on fridges. Things are really moving in good directions 🙂

Synchronisation with Kasten, just to filesystems now

Sometimes it seems with faster and faster JavaScript-JIT-compilers and Gears/HTML5 the current software stacks, written in other languages, like e.g. Qt/KDE are going to be legacy. Google Docs & Co. show what is possible, with the browser as the generic adapter to the platform.
But the current software stacks are fighting back. Things like the openSUSE Build Service make it possible to have your code compiled and ready to be delivered for several platforms, run natively by the hardware you actually bought to do so, instead of having some resources abused for virtual layers. It just needs code which does not (over-)use platform-specific constructs. The expansion of Qt/KDE to more and more architectures is a fine example here what is possible.
Curious what will be next, perhaps Javascript programs using alternatively binary blocks of code compiled for popular hardware, given the OS has built-in access control? Things are merging.

With this in mind I congratulate the people from AbiWord on their new version 2.8, which not only improves the support for the open spec’ed on-disk format OpenDocument (.odt), but especially improves on the collaboration features which integrate the Web 2.0. That looks really great. My only nitpick is that this seems to be a non-FLOSS webservice. I just hope they find a good business model so that the software for the server can be shared, too. Others, like Inkscape or hopefully soon KOffice, might be interested in such a server system, too.

I also congratulate the people from Étoilé, who just have started to send objects over XMPP. This all sounds so promising.

Realtime collaboration and such data model synchronisation is something I hope Kasten, my WIP framework for composing programs, one day supports out of the box, too. From the very beginning this has been considered in the design, even if it is not yet too visible. And it still will take some time to get there.

There is other stuff to do first, like making Okteta work with very large files. This isn’t done yet, I am still working on it, but have hopes this feature will make it into the next release. Working with very large files means only loading the parts which are currently interesting (e.g. solved by memmapping the file). Currently Kasten, the framework Okteta is built on, only has support for the concept of loading document objects completely from the remote storage (like the filesystem on disk) to the working memory, done by subclasses of AbstractModelSynchronizer. There is a specialized subclass AbstractModelFileSystemSynchronizer, which takes care for the common stuff on dealing with the filesystem, including loading/storing to remote filesystems with KIO::NetAccess. So the/your document-specific subclass has just to implement the de- and encoding of the data from a QFile to the working data model.

Now, AbstractModelFileSystemSynchronizer was not really finished, so before adding a new construction site in Kasten for the partial-loading of files I want to finish the old one for the complete loading. E.g. there was no support for a property State of the remote storage. Thanks to KDirWatcher there is now some easily done initial one. Investigations are still needed how to make sure there is no race-condition where another process might break into writing to the file, reading the file’s timestamp of the own modification and starting to watch for changes again.
Also, KDirWatcher does not work for Kio-slaves. So files loaded from them are just marked to be in Unknown state. Besides, if the network connection is down, they are set to Unreachable. Solid::Networking serves this with just a few lines again 🙂

See in the screenshot for the two state symbols now in the Documents tool: the left icon shows the working data state (saved changes, unsaved changes), the right one the remote storage state. The yellow flag means Unknown, in case you wonder, and turns into the Network-disconnected icon if you disconnect from the network, like pulling the plug (looks impressive if you have several files loaded e.g. by sftp:// 😉 ). Well, seems I need to apply for some more icons from our icon heros.

Other changes in this area:

• The action Revert is renamed to Reload. Revert will not do what the name says if the storage copy was modified since the loading of the document. Revert would rather mean undoing all changes, so that action semantic might rather appear in the Edit menu, for some quicker navigation through the change history.
• The actions Reload and Save are only available if they are useful and usable. E.g. they are disabled if there are no known changes in both the working copy of the document data and the storage copy or the connection to the remote storage is lost.
• Also new documents which are generated from random data or user input (like parameters) are set to modified, so closing them without adding any further content will still trigger the question if you really want to discard this perhaps unique data.

Okteta: Fighting the crisis with productivity from generators

(And if it is just random data)

There has been some productivity-related productivity in Kasten and Okteta development the last days, as can be seen by commit logs like “added: factories to create generators” 😉 :

Kasten, my WIP framework for composing programs, gained some AbstractModelDataGenerator class to serve as base class for data generating stuff. It also got a general Insert controller which plugs into the menu, offers all available data generators and has the chosen one generate its data (if parameterized after showing a config dialog) and then inserts it into the current document. And with the AbstractModelDataGenerator around, I extended the AbstractDocumentFactory to also create new documents from QMimeData and reworked the general New controller: it now not only offers to create an empty document, but also to create one prefilled with data from one of the data generators. Or by the data from the clipboard, which also serves QMimeData. And while I was at it, the shell now no longer rejects D’n’D data other than file urls to non-document areas (like next to tabs or the empty space on start) but passes it to the document factory to see if it can construct a new document from it, all by just a few lines of codes. Kasten may look bloated to some (including myself sometimes) but it has it’s value here and there 🙂

To see if it is working Okteta, the KDE 4 hex editor, which is built on Kasten, has got some generators:
For one Okteta since the first release had some simple Insert pattern controller, which now got ported to a plain data generator plugin (+ config editor). Then two weeks ago I found myself for the x-th time in life in the need for data in the whole range of all bytes, from 0 to 255. So I had done a clone of the pattern controller and already added as a Insert sequence controller (which started the idea for these general data generators). Got ported to a plain generator plugin, too.

Another generator perhaps useful might be a random data generator. So now there is one. It is based on srand(time(0)) and rand(), which may be of different quality depending of the platform’s libc. If you instead want a certain algorithm, please contribute and send me some code for it filling a QByteArray, licensed like the rest of the file, I am happy to add some alternative RNG to select from 🙂

Lots of TODOs and ideas coming with this, but works already. If you like screenshots, have a look:

And there has been even more productivity with regard to Okteta: First external contribution is coming with a new tool 🙂 More on this soon…

Call for action: Write your own plugins for Okteta

Up to now I have written Okteta, the KDE 4 hex editor, completely on my own. This has pros and cons:
The biggest pro is that I do not have to argue a lot about design decisions, especially as I have some big plans with the co-developed framework Kasten, which Okteta is built on (to serve as testing area) and which might not yet be understood/followed by others (could just be a crazy idea, after all) as I have implemented only parts of it and also added unmarked intermediate shortcuts to get things running already.

The biggest con is that Okteta doesn’t grow as fast as it could.* So there might be some features you, dear Okteta user, are still missing from it. Additionally, remember that I do not really use Okteta myself, it really is almost only a testing area of Kasten for me (I still am happy if Okteta is already a useful tool to many, as this indirectly results in more testers for Kasten). And so I concentrate on things which help to develop Kasten further. I now turned to think about support for very large files, meaning working with data not completely copied to the working memory (just do not hold your breath for this 😉 ).

So, what about the binary filters (e.g. a bit switcher), your export plugins (e.g. Base64) or even complete tools (I can not even imagine) you are missing from Okteta and hoping for in a future release?

For the coming weeks I am going to show you how simple it should be to help yourself, in a series of short tutorials.

Okteta/Kasten has been designed very modular, with a lot of interfaces and plugin-prepared structures. For now everything is hardcoded, but as we have readwrite access to the sources this is of no great problem here 🙂

There is almost one month left for you to decide if you want to make your hands and keyboard dirty with an addition to Okteta, then the soft features freeze will hit the development branch for KDE 4.4. And only November 11th would set the barrier for a basically working solution, so should be enough time to get your plugin done, given it doesn’t include rocket science. Or you could be still pleased if it only will be part of KDE 4.5 next summer (well, still not assumed to include rocket science). In any case I will be happy to help you where doable.

The first tutorial will appear on sunday (September 27th) and teach you how to write a binary filter (Update: online now). So stay tuned if you are in need of a hex editor like Okteta and interested to give the implementation of your needed features yourself a try.

* For sure, the pace of development for Okteta has been quite good, just have a look at the automatic analysis done for Okteta at ohloh.net. 48,042 lines of code have been gathered in the last two or so years. Which, using LOC while admitting it’s an evil metric for code work, is estimated to have, taking the given default average salary of $ 55,000 / year, a “Project Cost” of some $ 641,343. I just hope I never will write myself this bill. Because the moment I do I am for one in big debt to someone and also in trouble because someone doesn’t pay my bill. 😉
Another interesting metric seems behind the assigned property “Well-commented source code”: Well, I have spread the code over quite some files, and each and every file has 20 lines comment from the license header. The other comment I often leave is done with this pattern:

// TODO: some improvement

currently around 560 times. Instead almost all API is missing proper apidox. So, rather not well-commented. Still, I use expressive, thus pretty long names for classes and variables, so comments are not often needed (it’s obvious what ByteArraySourceCodeStreamEncoderConfigEditorFactory does, or?). But I wonder if this metric takes this into account 😛

Polishing the tools for Okteta 0.4

While still avoiding to tackle the next big task for Okteta, supporting very large files, thanks to a strain in my right leg I have found some time to polish the tools a little.

Last night I worked on the input widgets for addresses/offsets and byte strings. Those enable the user to select one from several formats in which to do the input (auto detection still a TODO). While I wanted to make a widget similar to the one of the searchbar for Konqueror, with the current format to be selectable like the current engine in the left of the searchbar widget, I found this not easy to implement and the searchbar implementation not pleasing my needs (e.g. not focusable with keyboard, no method QComboBox::setEditedIcon() or similar). So I stayed with my old implementation where the format is selected in an external combobox, but which is now placed to the left of the input field and only shows an abbr. of the format type (“Hex”, “Dec”, …). The input field itself is a combobox which can and is used to store previous inputs (the popup still lacks a delegate to also show the corresponding format). These widgets are now used all over Okteta, just cmp. the screenshot below.

Already in trunk for some time are support in Kasten for inlined dialogs, with Okteta’s Goto dialog and the (new for 0.4) Select-range dialog (see screenshot) ported to it. Additionally all tool views are ported to the new AbstractToolWidget in Kasten which has support for default buttons which are activated on the press of the Return key, like you know from the dialogs. So if any widget in a tool view has focus (and doesn’t eat the Return key itself) one now longer needs to switch the focus to the button but can simply press Return (just seems that the Oxygen style does not give an extra style to default buttons?).

Also switched to use QFormLayout where possible. And found the great KIntNumInput, so any units are shown inside the input field (including bytes, as in number of bytes 😉 )

Just the Find and Replace dialogs may stay popup dialogs for a while. For one I have no idea how to best place all the options into an inline-dialog (e.g. the solution in Kate does not follow my workflow) without getting a monster dialog. Even with the Go-to and the Select-range inline-dialogs the window size is sometimes changed, which is a no-no IMHO. And for another on this change I want to implement search-as-you type, which is still lacking a proper foundation for worker threads and locking of document objects. So, support for very large files has a chance to be done before that. 🙂