KDevelop 4 - Looking at the feedback
Hey everyone,
I spent some time today browsing teh interwebz to look at the responses our first KDevelop 4.0 release triggered so far. Quite fun I have to admit, given this is the first release of something I actively helped to develop that actually gets a response on the net ;-) What I noticed among the ‘I use VS’, ‘I use vi’, ‘I use ed’ comments (besides ‘I use emacs’):
- sadly we didn’t update the screenshots everywhere yet, making some people believe we actually look like kdev 3 still ;-) this is not true, take a look here: http://apaku.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/kdevelop-4-0-screenshots/
- yes we have support for PHP and everyone knows PHP sucks but still everyone uses it ;-) But few seem to notice that C++ is actually “just another plugin”. And we already have support for Ruby, Java and Css somewhat working in the pipelines. And very experimental stuff for C#, python and XML is also there. Imo what we said in the release announcement is true: KDev 4 is much more open for new languages than anything before. It does take some effort, true, but the result is much more pleasing.
- we’d really welcome new blood in our dev team, esp. for new language support plugins or things like automake, qmake and qt-designer support. there are outdated plugins available, someone just has to polish them…
But all in all I’m amazed by the trolling/feedback ratio. It’s a really good feeling to see so many positive comments on various websites and $random-stranger defending KDevelop against the forces of the trolls :)
I’ll definitely continue working on KDevelop and make sure we’ll continue to improve over the time. This is just the beginning evil laughter :)
Btw. funniest comment on heise.de (German): KDevelop 4.0.0 is a released intended for developers. Of course, it’s an IDE, duh :P
Comments
Want to comment? Send me an email!
Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-07-20 22:32:00)
KDevelop 4.0 has some great features (the control flow graph demo I saw on YouTube was amazing!), but the lack of an integrated GUI builder stopped me dead in my tracks. I thought it was just the Kubuntu build, but the KDevelop 4 progress chart lists it as not complete as well.
The lack of a high quality, feature complete C++ IDE for Linux is a major impediment for attracting new developers to Linux. KDevelop seems to be the closest to that goal, but still so far away unfortunately. I rediscovered Java a few years ago, and Netbeans is what convinced me to stop doing Qt development and switch back to Java (after abandoning it several years earlier).
Never underestimate the importance of a feature-complete IDE in attracting developers to a platform. A good IDE should take the drudge work out of creating applications, and Linux doesn’t yet have one for C++ (KDevelop, QtCreator, Eclipse having been reviewed). The best IDE, by a HUGE margin, on Linux is Netbeans. Unfortunately, its C++ support is terrible, and its KDE support is non-existent. But for Java, it’s in a class all by itself.
KDevelop 4 has amazing potential, and I’m keeping my eye on it, but it isn’t yet usable.
Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-07-21 14:33:00)
I have to admit that I cannot understand nor follow people like you that cannot use KDevelop just because one of the tools (namely Qt Designer) is not integrated. This of course does not say that it should not be integrated. I just find it a pity that it is a reason for not using KDevelop alltogether.
But I completely agree that a good IDE is a killer argument for any development framework/environment. Lets hope that we’ll continue to advance KDevelop and bring you back to the bright world of Qt ;-)
Cya
Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-07-12 10:17:00)
For my professional cross platform C++ development, KDevelop 4 is the best IDE I have used. Looking forward to the C++0x and GIT support soon.
Comment by xax200 (not verified) (2010-06-12 01:58:00)
I love the work that’s being done on KDevelop. The PHP KDevelop already smokes eclipse’s! There is one thing that would make it even more awesome though, and that would be remote server syntax checking and testing. For example, if you have your PHP server over on your corporate development server with some files in a special global scripts folder where they can be called from anywhere, there’s no way you can detect that from your own machine. You’ll be getting annoying red squiggles when you try to require them and no syntax checking for functions you call from those global files. So, why not be able to configure your PHP projects to test on a different server by ssh? That way, you could be able to catch a lot of errors without even having to move your site over to the development box or your production servers.
Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-05-29 05:01:00)
I happen to like PHP.
That said, I don’t use an IDE for developing PHP stuff, only C++. And there is no way I would ever even try KDevelop 4.0 in the state that it is currently in. I like my automake projects, thank you very much, and I refuse to abandon them, so I’m sticking with 3.5.
Comment by craig (not verified) (2010-05-09 23:12:00)
You don’t need OS X or Windows 7… you can render fonts beautifully on Linux too, just depends on your preferences and setup. Some people prefer very crisp, hinted font rendering, while others prefer smoother, slightly more blurry anti- aliased fonts with no hinting. Different strokes for different folks. At least Linux gives you the choice :)
Comment by maninalift (not verified) (2010-05-11 12:43:00)
But it’s not as easy as it could be to change those settings - in KDE yes but globally, not so much.
Comment by craig (not verified) (2010-05-13 20:51:00)
I’m a longtime KDE user so maybe I’m just spoiled now ;)
Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-05-04 18:07:00)
It’s a pity the fonts in those screenshots are so bad… :( It distracts from what is really a great project. I would love to see KDev4 running on OS X or Win7 with native font rendering.
Comment by Daniel (not verified) (2010-05-04 17:42:00)
Hey, just wanna drop a line here about KDevelop4. I primarily program python all day and do spend a lot of time at the command line with vim. But when it comes to the desktop, I prefer KDevelop4. Granted, python support is pretty much nil at the moment until someone gets in and cleans up the plugin (which makes that rearranged menu bar kind of useless since I dont/cant use anything to the left of File), but what I look for in a desktop text editor, KDevelop delivers. Insanely fast startup time (i am use to vim after all), syntax highlighting and all those other basic text editing features like indent/unindent code blocks, organizing my workspace environment (i dig on a lot of the offerings of KDevelop in this area), customizing various shortcut behaviours. All really basic stuff honestly but KDevelop does all of this plus other goodies I use on and off. I’ve actually been a long time user of Komodo-Edit and Eclipse/PyDev and I have to admit that these are much more featureful for a python developer, but when it comes down to every day, hour to hour use, they can be a pain with slow startup times, slow file opens, slow scrolling of large files, and well just slowness here and there in general (back and forth between the two in different areas).
So anyway, thanks for your contributions to KDevelop
Comment by Zlodo (not verified) (2010-05-04 11:58:00)
I wanted to say thanks for the great ide!
It’s the only ide that works well with my current personal project. It loads my cmakelists.txt and just works and allow me to edit any file and build my project with a minimum of fuss. It’s more than I can say of most IDEs I have used.
It also does a very good best-effort on code completion despite the presence of a lot of yet unsupported C++0x constructs.
Keep up the good work.
Comment by thorGT (not verified) (2010-05-04 11:22:00)
Now you want to see some trolling, don’t you? Well,here it is ;)
I’ve asked this a number of times already, but got no response. Please, please, please add typename keyword support. Advanced template code is impossible to hack on due to this feature missing. And in case you ask, I’ve already filed a bug and updated it yesterday. No response yet.
And keep up the great work!
Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-05-04 14:48:00)
yes well you might think so but we will actually implement this at one point or the other ;-) but trust me - it’s not as simple as that and your constant nagging doesn’t help at all…
Comment by maninalift (not verified) (2010-05-04 11:08:00)
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: The “small” thing that has impressed me a huge amount - and that I really think every single application developer should look at - is the reorganisation of the menu bar.
You have made a logical structure that is clearly grouped. You have broken with some lazy dogmas like “file operations always go in the left-hand menu whatever it is named”. Before I saw KDevelop4 I thought that it was inevitable that sophisticated programs would have confusing menu structures. Visual Studio, digiKam, everyone else take note.
This stuff should go in the GUI textbooks.
Comment by Wolfgang (not verified) (2010-05-04 10:29:00)
Hello,
I am not a power-all-day-long-developer but I have done some Java stuff using eclipse and some C++ stuff using kdevelop. I really love kdevelop for C++, and I am looking forward to your Java support.
Great work on which you (can) must be proud of!
Cheers Wolfgang
Comment by binarylooks (not verified) (2010-05-04 08:29:00)
Considering your trolling/feedback ratio, this might be boring: KDevelop 4 was the first IDE I used and I think I’ll never need anything else. I’m currently using it to help development of Plasma Media Center and it feels natural. I just wish I could use it’s full potential. I seem to have problems setting up GDB and launch configurations. It might also just be my lack of development experience. Also, it keeps on putting tabs everywhere. :-p. Anyway. Great work and it makes life easier.
Comment by senkal (not verified) (2010-05-04 00:45:00)
Hi, it’s nothing unusual. I were expecting this. Kdevelop 4 is really that good so comments are positive :D I hope more developers will now interest with kdevelop. Thanks for your work (everyone who helped to make this IDE so professional). PS. Sorry for my English .