As much as I love Kate editor, as I mentioned in my previous post, setting up Python language server has always been a bit fiddly if you want it to work with virtual environments.

However thanks to Kate documentation and some Big Think:tm:, I managed to figure it out, and now I wish to share it.

I could just show the code and that's it, but I wanted to write this so that someone new-ish has easier time to understanding what to do.

Language server: python-lsp-server

The language server I am talking about in this instance is the python-lsp-server. VSCode uses something called Pylance, but that's proprietary and probably can't ever be made to work with any other editors. One thing I do miss from Pylance is the easy way to make it work with virtual environments.

Also silly side tangent, I kinda find it weird people call them "LSP" and not "LS" or "language server." LSP means Language Server Protocol, which is how the language server talks to your editor.. I mean I know it doesn't matter but it's a silly pet-peeve.

Python language server plugins

I also want to utilize ruff which is a nice linter and formatter for Python. To use it with the language server, you need to use python-lsp-ruff. This makes the language server use ruff instead of it's own built-in things.

Configurations for virtual environments

Kate docs actually mention this part. Search the documentation for pylsp_in_env. It's a bash script which we will be making, but with a tiny twist.

Bash script

We need to create a bash script called pylsp_in_env (or whatever you desire) which Kate will use to figure out the virtual environment before running the language server.

It's rather simple script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

path=$1
cd $path
if [ -d "${path}/.venv" ]; then
  source $1/.venv/bin/activate
fi

if [ -d "${path}/venv" ]; then
  source $1/venv/bin/activate
fi

exec pylsp --check-parent-process

What we do here, instead of the documented example, is to check where the activate script actually is. Some people prefer having it .venv and some venv and there's other names too I'm sure.

So we get the path from the command, then source the virtual environment in right folder, and then execute the pylsp --check-parent-process as Kate would do by default.

Save this this to your $PATH somewhere so that Kate can see it, or alternatively add the path to your Kate settings. This PATH setting is in Kate 25.04.0 at least. Don't forget to chmod +x ./pylsp_in_env so that it has the execution permissions

Kate LSP config

Finally, just add this to your Kate LSP config file:

{
    "servers": {
        "python": {
            "command": [
                "pylsp_in_env", "%{Project:NativePath}"
            ],
            "root": ".",
            "url": "https://github.com/python-lsp/python-lsp-server",
            "highlightingModeRegex": "^Python$",
            "settings": {
                "pylsp": {
                    "plugins": {
                        "ruff": {
                            "enabled": true
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Of course, if you have more language servers in your config, make sure to add the above part next to them.

If you don't want to use ruff, you can remove the whole settings bit.

What I wanted to note here is that Kate now gives the full path to the python project using the %{Project:NativePath} argument. There's more of these %{} items in Kate, which can be found by scouring the documentation.

Done!

That's pretty much it. Now restart the language servers from Kate menus, or restart Kate, and Kate is now aware of any of the virtual environments running inside your Python project.

Do note that I have no idea how poetry etc. do this. I think they may need some kind of different script. If I ever need to figure that out, I will extend this post or make new one.

If you read the Kate docs, you may have already understood what to do and done so. I however wanted to share my solution for this, which differs very slightly from the one in the documentation.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helps!

It’s no news that cool kids don’t blog anymore. So passé! That’s why Harald and I, we have started doing some mild streams where we discuss topics around our little FOSS perspective like KDE, Plasma, KDE Linux and the likes.

We’ll be more than happy for you to join! twitch.tv/daft_code

I’ve been announcing the next episodes in my Mastodon account as well as in the involved Matrix channels. There I try to announce the next episodes and when they’ll happen. It’s generally been on Sunday evenings.

We are total noobs about using Twitch and all that, don’t hesitate to suggest us how to do better.

Looking forward to having you over!

Consider supporting us!

The past week I spent in the lovely Austrian City of Graz attending the Plasma Sprint and Grazer Linuxtage 2025.

Sprint

After no Plasma Sprint in 2024 the attendance was massive, it was the biggest sprint I attended - if not the biggest in recent KDE history, the Nuremberg ‘Mega Sprint’ in 2019 may come close but that multiple sprints in one! The result was a lot of productive discussions, hacking and fun conversation during dinner and afterwards.

A subset of all the interesting discussions and things that happened at the sprint:

• We discussed sandboxing 3rdparty plasmoids which was talked about already a bit during last years Akademy. It involves interesting technical challenges and tradeoffs but would also enable for example distributing plasmoids through flatpak in the future.
• A new applet loading mechanism was proposed by Nicolas enable us to take advantage of the modern QML infrastructure and tooling
• We decided to do one more point release for regular Plasma releases (i.e. a .6) but no more LTS releases
• Streamlining the many repositories Plasma consists of
• Switching qdoc for documentation instead of doxygen (like Frameworks will do soon)
• Vlad presented his very impressive Dynamic Wallpaper Engine and how we could upstream parts of it to Plasma proper

…and a whole lot more, be sure to check out all the other reports by the other attendees over at the Planet

I also got some hacking in between session and on the train and managed to finish a very nice feature for Plasma 6.4. Systemmonitor will now be able to display the GPU usage of each process and how much VRAM it is using.

Grazer Linuxtage

On Saturday we had a booth at Grazer Linuxtage showcasing Plasma and KDE software such as Krita on various form factors such as laptop, phones, the Steam Deck and a graphics tablet with a built in screen (connected to a laptop). The interest was immense and it was very nice to see many children attending the event and being interested in Linux. After the event we even managed to pull an elaborate heist and smuggle the poster designating our booth curled up inside a roll-up banner outside the venue.

Epilog

Big shutouts to Harald and Kevin for organizing the Sprint. Thank you to Grazer Linuxtage for making it possible to have the Plasma Sprint there, my employer Techpaladin Software for sending me there, and the KDE e.V. that makes it possible for others to attend (donations always welcome).

Next week I will in Munich to attend Qt World Summit and Qt Contributor Summit, see you around!

Earlier last month I helped organize conf.kde.in 2025 in the Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This was very exciting for me as it was apparently in same venue where I had attended my very first KDE event!

General structure of event

As of recent years, conf.kde.in has been three-day event, two days of conference followed by one day of un-conference sessions, those of who attend the Akademy or GSoC mentor summit, this is not a new format. Un-conference allows audience to schedule a session they’re interested in and is pretty much open-mic session for anyone.

I attended my first Plasma sprint, and indeed my first in-person KDE event! It was an amazing experience! 😄

It was really great to be in the same room with so many talented and knowledgeable people. The amount of expertise gathered together was fantastic. The usual difficulties with remote communication were gone, and suddenly we could have easy back-and-forths, go sit next to someone to ask their expert opinion, and big group discussions could flow freely in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Some of the cool things we talked about and worked on are: sandboxing (including things other than apps, like Plasma widgets and runners for KRunner), KNewStuff (where we can download new widgets/themes/etc), Activities, Telemetry, and oh so much more! We covered so much in such a short time it had my head spinning.

We also discussed the first-run experience (FRE) or out-of-the-box experience (OOBE) that is my current main focus. For those who are unfamiliar, this is the flow that happens when a user first turns on a new computer where it asks them to create the first user. Currently this doesn't exists for KDE (outside of some hacks that have significant drawbacks), and the user has to be created during system installation. For technically inclined users doing their own system install this is no problem, but it is a big problem for other scenarios; think for example about…

• Government organizations or large businesses who want to image computers with the system software
• OEMs who need to pre-install an operating system
• Used computer shops saving those millions of PCs that can't run Windows 11

For all of these scenarios and more, the operating system needs to be installed but the user account should not yet be created. Rather once the intended end-user has opened up the box and turned on their shiny new computer, only then should they be prompted to "Choose your username and password" (among other things).

It was great to be able to present the vision for this, and I got great feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. Working together we came up with a solid plan to proceed, and I've started the work of implementing all of these ideas!

On the personal front, the whole experience was pretty challenging for me. Right off the bat my pre-existing medical condition means that I don't have much energy to work with on a daily basis, and that I get sick worse/more easily than most people do.. and wow did I ever get hit with the whole shebang!

After being hired on as the new Plasma Software Engineer, I had just under 2 weeks notice to try and arrange to attend the sprint. This started with needing my passport; I already had an appointment to get it, but not until just after the sprint (I was getting it originally for use to attend Akademy!). So I had to go down and spend the entire day at the passport offices, to ask for it to be issued expedited - which thankfully I got! Then was a whirlwind of things like...

• Research (do I need a visa? what can I/can't I bring? what should I bring? Is there any potential issues bringing my meds? (yes), travel insurance, mobile service, etc)
• Booking travel & lodging, and trying to do so at a semi-reasonable price while booking last minute
• Buying supplies for travel (toothbrush, laptop bag, water bottle, travel umbrella, climate appropriate clothing (we just had snow/ice storms in Canada before I left, and it is still getting down near freezing at night!), etc, etc)

Though I will say it is pretty lucky I had been casually learning German for the fun of it the past couple years. I definitely need more speaking practice though!

I am very happy I managed to attend, but generally I would not recommend trying to arrange one's first international travel with only several day's notice haha! 😂

Yeah, that's right.. first. I've rarely been away from my hometown before, and I've actually never left my native timezone previously! So travelling to the other side of the planet was a bit of a change, to say the least. The travel was more than I expected: ~2 hr bus ride to the airport, waiting for hours to get on the plane, ~10 hrs across the ocean, ~2 hr layover, ~1 hr additional to Graz, then ~1.5 hrs figuring out the train/tram from the airport to the venue (I had to ask for help figuring out how to get to the train station).

With all of this, the jetlag, as well as working 9 to 10 hour days I was feeling incredibly exhausted to put it mildly. Then I thought I was having a massive attack of allergies (I did just come from the land of ice and snow to a place where everything is green and blooming after all…), alas sadly I did catch a cold or something quite nasty that I am still trying to shake off. 😷🤧🤒😴

I learned a whole lot about travelling, there are a bunch of things I would do differently, and I am confident that my next trip will go much more smoothly as a result!

I am so glad that I got to attend, because we got some great work done and I met lovely, friendly people. It was a very nice atmosphere, and everyone was very kind and welcoming. It is really good to be able to put faces to the names of people I've been working with for years in some cases!

I am really looking forward to seeing everyone again at Akademy~ 🎉 Tschüss!

What happens when you put three mobile OS devs into one room for more than a few minutes?

Fun times, that's what!

A few days ago I returned back home from Graz after attending my very first Plasma Sprint and it's been an incredible experience throughout. Everyone there was incredibly welcoming and we managed to not only have a great time, but also got a lot done.

As you might expect, my focus was mostly on Plasma Mobile, which was helped by Devin and Bhushan also attending in person. We chatted about technical challenges around power management, display notches, haptic feedback and so so much more - but maybe even more exciting in the short term, we managed to reproduce and fix a number of very annoying bugs that stopped me (and probably some others) from daily driving Plasma Mobile with my main SIM.

Double Call Bug

While calling on my OnePlus 6T worked really well for a while already there was a... quite annoying issue when receiving calls while the phone was locked: Plasma Dialer would receive two call notifications which in turns lead to the ring tone being doubled. So far so bad. The worse part was when accepting said call one of the two ring tones would continue. Now, the call itself worked fine, microphone, speakers, all good - you just had the ringing in your ears the entire time and had to reboot to get rid of it. Not great!

This was ultimately an issue with events being connected too often in certain cases like when a SIM card has a pin lock or the phone has (working) dual SIM. This is now fixed from Plasma 6.3.5 onwards. Yes, I kept the dev build on my phone until then ;)

Dialer freezing on lockscreen

The second big issue was that any time Dialer opened on top of the lock screen it would get stuck there after closing. The last frame rendered by the app would remain frozen on the lockscreen until it was rebooted or unlocked. The same bug could lead to essentially softlocking the phone on boot if session restore was enabled and the phone app was open, as it would initialize on top of the first-boot lockscreen and then stay frozen there (Which is why I disabled session restore for mobile before already).

This was ultimately an issue in KWin and how it handles certain effect types on the lockscreen and has also been fixed for 6.3.5. Until then as a workaround it's possible to disable KWin's Scale effect (which animates opening and closing windows) as that is what "got stuck" on the lockscreen.

To debug and fix both of these we made about 100 calls to and from various Plasma Mobile devices throughout the Sprint - Sorry to all the people who had to hear constant ringing, we really tried having it as quiet as possible!

Merged Changes

As far as merged changes go, it's... short this time around since free time wasn't kind to me these last few months, so most of what I did, I did on the sprint with others and the blog-worthy parts of that are covered above, but there's a bit:

• Made some interactions with the modem asynchronous to improve UI performance (these could potentially freeze the UI for a short time).

Feels a bit weird to have a list for one item, so let's make it two:

• This wasn't me, but Devin fixed the navigation gestures being enabled when the navbar was active which was terrible user experience and I'm so grateful for this finally being fixed because this bug absolutely broke me. Thanks Devin for saving my sanity!

Unfinished

I did make some progress on other tasks though, even if they (still) aren't done yet:

• On the sprint I had a good long chat with Xaver about my corner touch gesture MR for KWin in preparation for feature parity between navbar and gesture navigation. He has been working on a refactor of the gesture code in KWin which decouples touch and mouse gestures from each other and we came to the conclusion that it's more sensible to base my work on his refactor as it then has to touch a lot less code and stops sharing code paths with other mostly unrelated features.
• As part of that conversation we also touched on incorporating some of the custom gesture logic I created for the task switcher gesture into KWin directly, as that currently still lives in the Plasma Mobile repo.
• I've restarted work on my "refactor" of the mobile task switcher again to make it more maintainable and performant by annotating types and following some rules to allow Qt to create a precompiled binary of the QML files using qmlcachegen.

Closing Remarks

I want to circle back to the Sprint and emphasize again how amazing it was - and not only that, since then I've kept my SIM card in my postmarketOS Plasma Mobile phone because the two dealbreaker bugs for me are now fixed. My Android will unfortunately stay with me for the foreseeable future mostly due to banking/payment apps, but it's a step in the right direction.

As an extra goodie for the end, I want to show off Balatro running natively on Plasma Mobile: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@l_prod/114401321865300843 (Tech can be so cool

This year’s Plasma Sprint had a very special meaning for me. For the first time, in a long time, I feel like I am contributing something big for the community. It has the potential of setting our development process on steroids.

The goal is to remove so much designing from the work our developers do and bring more design to the hands of designers. That way we can all communicate better and focus on the things that we do best.

My goal for the sprint was to get buy-in from the development team to start the process of implementing our design system foundations. The days were long but the team was positive about this change. While we don’t know exactly how big things will get, we at least are committed to delivering an easier development platform for our Community.

With that in mind, I completed (first pass) the work on making monochrome icons. I then started making colorful icons for our colorful collection. I was able to get a good idea of what works well for us.

A couple of amazing things allowed me to make better icons. Qt 6.9 onward contains a bigger implementation of TinySVG which now allows us to use Gaussian blurs and offsets to create shadows and gradients. If you didn’t know this, our previous icons had to rely on cutouts and tricks to generate gradients. This added a tremendous amount of graphic development time. However, with this change, we don’t have to do this kind of work. I am so excited for this. So excited that I wanted to show you a preview of the colorful icons:

Please note that these are still in early development and there is a lot of testing that I need to do to make them viable and visible for users. They may change a lot between now and the time they are provided. However, my goal is to have a complete Breeze icons replacement that users can test by Akademy 2025.

So while all the friends were coding, I was clicking away 1000 clicks per minute to get this part going forward! haha.

We also decided to map our design system variables to the elements provided by Qt. I will be doing that work as well and already set up a project in Qt Creator to get started. Should be able to share that with the team soon.

All in all, I was happy to see everyone, develop awesome software together and I am looking forward to our next gathering in Berlin later this year.

I was just released from the hospital after a 3 day stay for my ( hopefully ) last surgery. There was concern with massive blood loss and low heart rate. I have stabilized and have come home. Unfortunately, they had to prescribe many medications this round and they are extremely expensive and used up all my funds. I need gas money to get to my post-op doctors appointments, and food would be cool. I would appreciate any help, even just a dollar!

• GoFundMe
• Patreon
• Github
• Donorbox

I am already back to work, and continued work on the crashy KDE snaps in a non KDE env. ( Also affects anyone using kde-neon extensions such as FreeCAD) I hope to have a fix in the next day or so.

Fixed kate bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503285

Thanks for stopping by.

We are proud to announce the release of Kdenlive 25.04.0. Here are some highlights of this major release:

Object segmentation

A new plugin based on the SAM2 model now allows you to create object masks to remove the background of your videos or apply an effect only to an object. All processing is done locally.

Improved audio waveforms in timeline.

A nice refactoring was done by Etienne André to make the audio thumbnails faster and more precise.

OpentimelineIO import/export

Darby Johnston rewrote our OpentimelineIO import and export function using the C++ library. Now you can exchange projects with other editing applications that support this open source file format. Please note that effects, filters, and transitions are not exported as each application uses its own standard.

Workflow improvements

Among the many small improvements, here are some of the noteworthy changes:

• The duration of multiple adjacent clips can be changed in one operation

• Allow vertical zooming of audio waveforms

• Fixed proxy clips workflow for videos with an alpha channel
• Added Shift+Click to expand/collapse all effects in the stack
• It is now easier to find out which monitor is active as the time code widget now uses a different color
• Added a search feature to the project notes, and made standard search shortcut work on all widgets
• Fixed UI translations not appearing correctly despite being translated
• Kdenlive now remembers the last used LUT files when doing color correction, making it easier to access them
• Fixed Render widget hidden behind main window on Mac

Many other improvements made it into this release, and we closed more than 30 reported bugs. Please see the change log below for details.

Last minute fixes

Some last minute fixes have been included in our binaries:

• Fixed a corruption when copying and pasting sequence clips to another project
• Improved the Title Editor's text outline to follow the font curves more closely
• Fixed an application freeze when trying to extract the last clip in a track
• Made the Auto Save feature less aggressive by increasing the time intervals and fine tuning the triggers in order to prevent a severe lag in large projects

The work on the OpentimelineIO and audio waveform features was made possible thanks to all the people who contributed to our fundraising, see our final campaign report.

Give back to Kdenlive

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!

Need help ?

As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.

Get involved

Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :

• Helping to identify and triage bugs
• Contribute to translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.