Recent content on Ignorance is bliss...
KDE Gear 25.12 got just released. This includes my fixes (or workarounds) for Konsole & Kate window activation on Wayland. If you now start Kate or Konsole inside Konsole, the new processes will properly activate their windows to come on top of Konsole. This works both for just starting new instances and for re-using already running ones. For more details, see my older post about the…
Like in the years before, KDE does an end of the year fundraiser campaign . Beside that Plasma will show some small popup to ask if you want to sponsor us with a donation. It looks like this year that is already going well, below the state as of today, 7th December 2025. I want to say to all that already donated: Thanks a lot!
The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects. Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time, be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant. The same happens for our communication channels or web sites. 20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like…
Visiting my parents before going to Akademy I found the manual of my first Linux distribution ever: S.u.S.E. Linux 5.1 from 1997. Given my first PC was some Pentium 100 with 16 MB of main memory and Windows 95, that was my first dive into open source software. Seems I went in less than 2 years from starting on Windows to at least trying out Linux.
Window Activation, what’s that? In short: for some actions you want to activate your application window. How to do that differs from platform to platform. Some weeks ago there was a post by Kai about window activation on Wayland . It explains nicely how the XDG Activation protocol works and how the different parts of the KDE & Qt stack implement it to correctly allow to activate the right…
This is an update of my Plasma & Kate on Wayland end of 2021 post from close to 4 years ago. Wayland, what? Since years (or let’s say a decade now) Wayland based compositors are promoted as the successors to the venerable X.org X11 display server. If you want to have some more high level overview about what is different to good old X11 see the Wayland Architecture overview. But my…
Here we are in the year 2025 and every company that wants to grab your money now peddles AI. Even most search engines will now start with some “AI powered” summary. Unfortunately, what they give you is just some deep learning intelligence fake. Just imagine, you don’t read the links yourself, but you pass that to some friend/colleague/… that might be a nice person but is…
The open source project I work on for the longest time is KDE and there more specific Kate . This means I look at user bug reports for over 20 years now. The statistics tell me our team got more than 9000 bugs since around 2001 (just for Kate, this excludes the libraries like KTextEditor that we maintain, too). That is a bit more than one bug per day for over two decades.
In this rather lengthy post I talk a bit about the current issues with icons for the KDE applications I work on or use. Let’s start with looking at what I mean with KDE applications and what the current state is, up to KDE Frameworks 6.2 and current KDE Gear 24.02. Then let’s see what will be improved in future releases. What do I mean with ‘KDE Applications’ If I speak…
How it shall look… Linux & BSDs Windows macOS State on Fedora 40 Workstation & XFCE Spin… Screenshots taken from the GNOME bugtracker , copies to not stall their GitLab instance. I think that is rather unpleasant and for e.g. the left icon-only border just an unusable insult.
Unix like systems with X11 or Wayland All Unix like systems with either X11 or Wayland are well supported since ever. Linux with X11 and now Wayland is for a long time the primary system on that Kate work happens. Over the years it was, like most of the KDE applications , ported to various BSD variants. Be it some mainstream Linux distribution like Fedora or a niche one like NixOS , Kate is…
The Qt 6 based KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) development is ongoing since some time. Already many things including Plasma and several applications, like Kate, have working KF6 based development versions. KDE contributors did meet this week online for planning the final release time-frames. We came up with this current plan : Frameworks / Plasma/ Gear Release Schedule Plan Following on from the last…
The Planck Keyboard Over the past two years I tried out a few different keyboards for fun. I started with common form factors like TKL boards, went over 75% boards like the Q1 and then to a 60% HHKB . For typing feel, the HHKB is really amazing, but unfortunately the programmable features of a stock HHKB board are very limited. Now that I went down to 60%, I will give a more extreme keyboard a…
Keyboards and Open-Source, how is that related? In my Keyboard Fun post from last year I talked a bit about my interest in mechanical keyboards. Since then, I played around with a few more keyboards/switches/keycaps/… Interesting enough, beside the actual hardware, naturally there is some software component to all these keyboards, too. Whereas most commercial keyboards still come with…
Wayland, the future after X11 Since years Wayland based compositors are promoted as the successors to the venerable X.org X11 display server. In the embedded space it seems Wayland already has made a lot of progress and some distributions start to use it per default, too. My experience of the past years I tried Wayland over the last few years multiple times, but I most often needed to go back to…
In the last few years I started to use Telegram as my main messenger, beside good old SMS/e-mail. I never used WhatsApp as I try to stay away from the Facebook/Meta/… ecosystem. Telegram seemed like a good choice as a lot of people I know are there and we e.g. mirror our KDE channels often to Telegram for better outreach, too. And all old messengers like ICQ more or less were abandoned by…
Keyboards? In the recent past, I started to get more interested in the quality of the keyboards I use at work and home. I always hated to use very cheap low-profile boards, but otherwise I more or less always worked with what came stock with my PC in the good old times ;) TKL boards A longer time ago I bought some Xtrfy K4 TKL White Edition keyboard, my first keyboard that had no numbers block. I…
In my last BorgBackup post I described my new setup using BorgBackup for the backup of my private data. After two weeks of use, I have now first experiences on the way the incremental backups perform and some additional information how I apply this to backup a virtual FreeBSD server hosting some of my stuff. Incremental Backup Performance ;=) I must confess, I am positively impressed. As told…
Backup is always something you under-appreciate until you need it. Therefore, since I lost a lot of my mails due to non-existing backups in the past, I tried to keep proper backups around the last decade. At least this allowed me to keep all my Kate related development mails intact since 2001 or so, not that bad ;=) My old way of doing backups: rsync & duplicity So far, I did my backup on my Unix…
The KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. The KDE e.V. is for example responsible for paying the servers that run our GitLab instance and all our other web services. The e.V. takes care of sponsoring developer sprints and contributor travel costs, too. You did participate at some Akademy ? This wouldn’t have been…
I tried to compile the Picolibc that uses the Meson build system with CompCert . The CompCert install I tried uses the GNU/GCC toolchain for preprocessing and linking. That makes the compiler relatively compatible to a GCC, beside that not all command line options are supported. I was used to CMake projects and there it is normally enough to just set CC=ccomp and you are ready and set (at least if…
I bought a MacBook end of 2014. My initial reason to buy it was to improve the Kate port for macOS. Beside that, I wanted to try if the Apple ecosystem and macOS are really that great and will solve all my issues in life (short answer: no, they aren’t, at least not for me). The HiDPI screen looked nice, too :=) After some initial “not a lot works”, if you don’t go the…
At work we use the LLVM/clang libraries for pre-processing and parsing C/C++ stuff. During some experimenting with the current master version of these libraries, I stumbled on unexpected crashes inside our unit-tests on Windows. We work with MSVC 2019 on Windows and all worked fine with LLVM 9.x, but with master, close to all my tests did now segfault in aligned_free. I first thought that might be…
What is a High DPI Display? In the past, most displays had (or the OS pretended to have) around 96 PPI , more or less. If you differed a bit and had too small/large UI elements, you mostly just resized your default font size a bit and were kind of happy. In the last years, more and more displays arise that have a much higher PPI values, which allows for e.g. very crisp rendering of text.
KDE applications on Windows? One of the new goals of KDE is to spread the use of the applications created by the KDE community. This doesn’t only include the use of them on Linux & other Unix-like operating systems, but Windows, too. The Successes :) The KDE community has some successfully cross-platform applications out there, like Krita and GCompris . The teams behind these applications…
At the moment, the yearly KDE conference Akademy is taking place in Milan. The yearly KDE e.V. meeting will be tomorrow. KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. For example the KDE e.V. is responsible for paying the servers that run our Phabricator/Bugzilla/Gitlab instances and all our web sites. KDE e.V. takes care of…
After my series of LSP client posts, I got the question: What does this actually do? And why should I like this or help with it? For the basic question: What the heck is the Language Server Protocol (LSP) , I think my first post can help. Or, for more details, just head over to the official what/why/… page . But easier than to describe why it is nice, I can just show the stuff in action.…
The new LSP client by Mark Nauwelaerts keeps making nice progress. It will not be shipped with the KDE Applications 19.08 release, but in master it is now compiled & installed per default. You only need to activate it on the plugin configuration page in Kate’s settings dialog to be able to use it. For details how to build Kate master with it’s plugins, please take a look at this guide…
The new LSP client by Mark Nauwelaerts made nice progress since the LSP client restart post last week. Reminder: The plugin is not compiled per default, you can turn it on via: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=“your prefix” -DENABLE_LSPCLIENT=ON “kate src dir” The code can still be found kate.git master, see lspclient in the addons directory. What is new? Diagnostics support: A…
Since my last post about the LSP client progress in May I didn’t work on that project at all I think. But the good news is, somebody else did scratch that itch on his own ;=) We have now a prototype plugin in kate.git master, see lspclient in the addons directory. It is not compiled per default, you can turn it on via: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=“your prefix”…
While browsing the ISO C++ homepage I stumbled over the results PDF of the Second Annual C++ Foundation Developer Survey “Lite” . I was astonished that Kate made it into the “Which development environments (IDEs) or editors do you use for C++ development?” results. ;=) Seems not only I use it as my normal editor for working on C++ code. And heads up, KDevelop is there, too! This is…
Two days ago I mentioned here that the bug report count of KTextEditor and Kate has risen to some not that manageable amount. For developers that report a bugs or wish, the best way to really get it solved is to scratch your own itch and provide some patch. I know this is not feasible for all bug reporters, as not all are developers nor will even the developers all have either time nor perhaps the…
The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200. If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated. The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query . Easy things anybody with a bit time could do would be: check…
The Kate lsp branch contains now the infrastructure as used by Qt Creator. In addition, clangd is now somehow started in a working state for the first project opened inside Kate. For example, if you use the CMake Kate project generator and you compile Kate from the “lsp” branch, clangd should pick up the compile_commands.json for a CMake generated Kate project. ;=) Unfortunately not…
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) allows the integration of stuff like code completion, jump to definition, symbol search and more into an application without manual re-implementation for each language one wants to support. LSP doesn’t fully allow an integration like KDevelop or Qt Creator do with the libclang based tooling aimed for C/C++ but on the other side offers the possibility to…
As you can read in the official Creator 4.9.0 release announcement , Qt Creator now uses the KSyntaxHighlighting Framework for providing the generic highlighting . This is a nice step for the wider adoption of this MIT licensed part of the KDE Frameworks . And this is not just an one-way consumption of our work. The framework got actively patches back that make it more usable for other consumers,…
Today I did run again into an old problem: You need to archive a lot small and large files inside a single Git repository and you have no support for Git LFS available. You did this several year and now you ended up in a state where cloning and working with the repository is unbearable slow. What now? Last time I did run into that, I archived the overfull repository to some “rest in…
During my web site upgrade, I reviewed the old stuff I had hosted on my long gone web sites but still archived here locally. An interesting thing I stumbled on are the KDE 3 -> 4 porting screenshots of Kate I saved in 2005. They actually show pretty nicely how far we have gone since 2005 with our development stack. The KDE 3 -> 4 transition was a large hassle. It did take weeks of work just to get…
Several years the Kate editor & my personal web site got hosted on a Hetzner root server. To reduce costs and switch away from old hardware they got now moved to an OpenVZ based virtual server at Host Europe . On both servers CentOS 7.x is running, it did always provide a stable foundation for the services these sites use. As with any server move in the past, I always need to search how to best…
I use the “Hugo Coder” theme for this page. After creating the privacy page (Impressum) , I did take a closer look at the generated HTML code to confirm I didn’t miss to state things there. I thought, given Hugo generates plain static HTML pages, I would be on the safe side. But unfortunately, the theme I use includes some external resources, like the Google web fonts… I…
After first using the Hermit theme, I moved to the Hugo Coder theme to have a nicer front page and menu at the top. Unfortunately that needs Hugo in the “extended” version. The binary one can download on https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases doesn’t run on CentOS 7, unlike the normal variant you get there (too new libstdc++ needed). One has to recompile it to get that…
After several years of failing to update my personal WordPress page, I restarted my website with the Hugo framework . The new website uses zero cookies (yes, no stupid cookie question) and no kind of analytic software. I hope my Impressum is done well enough to avoid any legal issues. At the moment the website is still very empty, I hope to fill in more content about my open source projects and…
Christoph Cullmann Professional Life I work as a Senior Software Engineer at AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH . My work is focused on static program analysis on both binary and source level. For binary programs, the worst-case stack usage or execution time are computed. For source programs, coding rules or run time errors are checked and a formally verified C compiler is offered. Open Source…
Links to stuff I often use/read/… Might be useful for others, but in the end just a pile of stuff I don’t want to search over and over again. The libraries linked below will in most cases be for C or C++. Programming News/Information News, Status & Discussion about Standard C++: https://isocpp.org Multi-Purpose Libraries Qt: https://www.qt.io BOOST: https://www.boost.org Compression…
Personal projects Personal stuff like this web site or my QMK config are hosted on this server: https://git.babylon2k.com/cullmann/ KDE I work on various projects that are under the KDE umbrella. The Kate editor, a full-featured text editor https://kate-editor.org https://invent.kde.org/utilities/kate The KTextEditor framework, a versatile text editor component KTextEditor API documentation…
Academic Life I studied computer science at Saarland University . I finished my Diploma thesis “Statische Berechnung sicherer Schleifengrenzen auf Maschinencode” in 2006. In February 2013, I successfully defended my PhD thesis about “Cache Persistence Analysis for Embedded Real-Time Systems” . The official publication can be found here . Publications Lists of my…
Impressum Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG Dr.-Ing. Christoph Cullmann Lessingstrasse 61 66121 Saarbrücken Deutschland Kontakt / Contact Telefon/Mobile/Signal: +49 176 235 467 98 E-Mail: christoph@cullmann.dev Datenschutzerklärung Verantwortliche Stelle im Sinne der Datenschutzgesetze, insbesondere der EU-Datenschutzgrundverordnung (DSGVO), ist: Dr.-Ing. Christoph Cullmann Lessingstrasse 61 66121 Saarbrücken…