Plasmate: Mini-IDE for Plasmoids

Feb 12, 2010

The KDE project has released a first alpha version of Plasmate. The small development environment is meant for writing Plasmoid applets for the KDE4 desktop.

Plasma uses Kate, a reliable KDE editor component. It also provides built-in integration with git version control, also a recent KDE addition. A documentation browser also shows the contents of KDE API documents.

The Plasmoid editor is limited to script languages like JavaScript, Ruby and Python that support Plasma applets. There are no immediate plans to grow Plasmate into an all-inclusive environment such as KDevelop or Qt Creator.

The alpha version is still functionally incomplete and "unpolished," as Aaron Seigo reports in his blog announcing the release. Nevertheless, he hopes it will be thoroughly tested based on source code downloads and bugs reported in the KDE bugtracker. Once the summer comes along, Plasmate should mature to a stabile 0.1 release. Development discussion can take place on plasma-develop@kde.org and in #plasma on irc.freenode.net.

Related content

  • Plasmoids

    With KDE 4.4, plasmoids can now be written in JavaScript or QtScript, thus opening up a whole new class of applications. Marcel shows how easy it is to build JavaScript plasmoids.

    more »
  • KDE 4.10

    KDE SC 4.10 was released six months after KDE 4.9, adding many new features. In the background, work is in full swing for the next generation, KDE Frameworks 5: a KDE based completely on Qt5 and QML.

    more »
  • KDE Plasma

    We take a peek at how to create your own plasmoids for the latest KDE desktop, giving you the power to build the perfect active desktop environment.

    more »
  • KDE 4.3

    At the beginning of August, the KDE project released the third major update of KDE 4 – reason enough to put KDE 4.3 through its paces and study the new features.

    more »
  • First Plasma Widgets Ported to Maemo 5

    At the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam Nokia gave away 300 N900 Internet tablets to KDE and Qt developers. The result is the first porting of KDE programs to Maemo 5.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Issue 244/2021

Buy this issue as a PDF

Digital Issue: Price $12.99
(incl. VAT)

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source