kate-custom

A suite of Kate plugins for people who despise menus. The aim is a text editor that is driven by the mouse at the cursor and by plain-letter keyboard input — never by hunting through nested menubars or memorizing complex chords.

Design constraints

These are hard constraints that shape every decision:

• Mouse-heavy. The fastest input is the mouse, used locally at the caret (radial / floating surfaces), not a trek to the menubar.
• One-handed typing. Keyboard input must work comfortably with one hand.
• No complex chords. Single modifier at most (Ctrl+letter). No leader-key chord trees, no multi-cursor keybinds.
• Compact keyboard. F-keys and nav clusters live on a layer toggle, so they carry extra cognitive cost and are avoided as primary triggers.
• Emacs/Sublime fluency. M-x (Alt+x) is comfortable and welcome as a primary keyboard entry point, as is a Sublime-style type-to-filter palette.

Unifying principle

One action registry. Three doors onto it: M-x (keyboard), a radial caret menu (mouse), and the : command line (optional). No action requires an F-key or a chord.

Why not just use Kate's command bar?

Kate's KCommandBar is a sealed widget: it accepts a list of actions via setActions() and exposes no hook to customize its matcher. Its matcher, KFuzzyMatcher, is single-needle, strictly in-order subsequence, with no typo tolerance — by KDE's own documentation, "gti" will not match "git". There is no "orderless" (space-separated tokens in any order) and no company-style live completion.

So the project replaces the palette rather than extending it, built on a custom matcher (FuzzyRanker).

Environment

• Kate 25.12.3, KDE Frameworks 6, Qt 6
• C++20, CMake, extra-cmake-modules
• C++ is the only first-class plugin path on this install (no Python/Pâté binding present)

Build

cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen ./build/bin/test_fuzzyranker   # run the matcher tests
ctest --test-dir build                                   # or via ctest

Install the plugin into Kate

The plugin builds to build/bin/kf6/ktexteditor/olliepalette.so. Drop it where Kate scans for KTextEditor plugins (a user path on QT_PLUGIN_PATH):

install -D build/bin/kf6/ktexteditor/olliepalette.so \
  ~/.local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt6/plugins/kf6/ktexteditor/olliepalette.so

Then in Kate: Settings → Configure Kate → Plugins → enable Ollie Command Palette. Press Alt+X (M-x) to open the palette; type to filter, Enter or click to run.

Status

See docs/PLAN.md for the full roadmap.

• Milestone 1 — FuzzyRanker (keystone): DONE. Orderless, layered scoring (exact / substring / word-initials / subsequence / bounded typo), merged highlight ranges. 14 unit tests, all green.
• Milestone 2 — custom palette widget: DONE. PaletteModel + PaletteWidget (frameless popup, live filtering, highlighted matches, keyboard + mouse activation). 10 model unit tests, all green.
• Milestone 3 — KTextEditor plugin + M-x: DONE. Loadable olliepalette.so; Alt+X opens the palette over every action in the window's GUI clients.
• Milestone 4 — radial caret menu (mouse door): next.

Layout

CMakeLists.txt            top-level KF6/Qt6/ECM project
src/
  fuzzy/
    fuzzyranker.{h,cpp}   orderless + layered fuzzy matcher
    test_fuzzyranker.cpp  QTest suite
  palette/
    palettemodel.{h,cpp}  ranked, filterable list model (headless)
    palettewidget.{h,cpp} frameless command-palette popup
    test_palettemodel.cpp QTest suite
  plugin/
    ollieplugin.{h,cpp}   KTextEditor::Plugin + M-x action registry
    ollieplugin.json      plugin metadata
docs/
  PLAN.md                 goal, constraints, roadmap