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.

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