MAY
17
2015
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Basic code completion for Rust in KDE's Kate (and later KDevelop)A few days ago the Rust community announced v1.0 of their new systems programming language, Rust. Having followed the project for some time and finally having used the language for a number of small projects this year, I've come to feel that using Rust is interesting, fun and productive. I'd like to highly encourage everyone to give it a look now that it's finally considered ready for prime time. To aid the effort I've put some Sunday hacking time into a basic Rust code completion plugin for Kate today. It's built around Phil Dawes' very nifty Racer, freeing it up to concern itself only with exposing some configuration and getting data provided by Racer into Kate. Not difficult at all. This is what it looks like in action: ![]() Completin' Caveats The plugin is very basic at the time of writing (which is minutes after getting things working, this Sunday is running out!). The mapping of completion match metadata to Kate's format (from fundamentals like the match type, to more complex features like smart grouping) can likely be improved still. Ditto for auto-completion behavior (i.e. defining the circumstances in which the completion popup will kick in automatically, as opposed to waiting for manual invocation) and simply performance. The plugin also doesn't work in KDevelop 5 yet, although that one's on KDevelop -- it doesn't support the KTextEditor plugin type present in Frameworks 5 yet. I'm told the KDevelop team has addressing this on their agenda. Syntax highlighting Both KDE and Rust implement the A MIME type for Rust source code While the plugin will run for all *.rs files, Kate/KDevelop plugins and syntax highlighting files preferably identify documents by their MIME type. It turns out there isn't a MIME type for Rust source code in shared-mime-info yet, so I've started the process of getting one in. (Update: Merged, along with this and this!) Getting the plugin
Update: As of May 20th 2015, the plugin is now bundled with Kate in its repository (browse), to be included in the next Kate release. You can get it by building Kate from git as whole, or you can do Getting in touch If you have any comments or requests and the blog won't do (say, you have a cool patch for me), |
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Comments
Great work!
Heh, fun. I just wanted to checkout out Rust a bit, now this comes in handy already ;)