Welcome to the first "Codevis Weekly Update"

What is Codevis?

Codevis is a tool to help developers manage large codebases, sponsored by Bloomberg, developed by Codethink and hosted on the KDE Infrastructure, with all that, completely opensource with a permissive license. Codevis uses a mix of technologies to do what it does, mainly LLVM and Clang to do the heavy lifting of understanding C++ Codebases, Qt for Callback management (in the form of Signal/Slots), KDE Frameworks libraries for the desktop application, and pure Qt for the CLI application. The database layer is written with Soci , the same database layer used in CERN, targeting sqlite3.

But How does it work?

Codevis analyzes all the visible source code from your project and creates a graph database (using a relational database) in a way that the analyst can load and interpret information from the codebase without loading the codebase. The graph-database is comprehensive, and has all the information we think it's important, and also a lot of information that's good to have, with a bunch of information because why not. Since something that's not important for me could be really important for a company with billions of lines of code.

It just generates visualization?

No. Codevis also allows you to draw your software architecture and generate ready-to-compile c++ code from it. Think of this as a possibility to have C++ templates for complex projects tha are also visually documented. You can create libraries, classes, structures, connect them quickly on a dirty mockup during a meeting, and the output could be 60 c++ files on disk with all the classes, folder-hierarchy and CMake ready to compile.

This will not add any method or implement anything, but just the creation of the C++ files and CMake scripts from a small architecture meeting is pretty interesting in my point of view.

It's been a Long long time without posting anything. Not that i'm lazy (well, a bit). But I have been working on a lot of things related to KDE this past few years, and I was finally able to release and opensource Codevis. I know this post is as small as a tweet, just checking if the integration is stil working

This year konsole kept the momentum it gained in 2020, and implemented quite a lot of userful new features. We Finally implemented Reflow, thanks to the combined effort of me and Carlos Alves - that was one of the most requested features of konsole for the entire history of the project.

Ahmad Samir fixed tons of issues in konsole, all around the codebase, he's the person with most commits on konsole this year, praise to him.

I'm using for my own personal projects a generator for c++ preferences for quite a while, I'll not say that it's heavily tested as KConfigXT is, but it is also much more simple than it.

While talking about it to a fellow developer he asked me how hard it would be to port the thing to KConfig (as the main backend I used was QSettings) - and the result is quite nice, the port toook less than a day, and now my generator generates configurations for both KConfig and QSettings.

• Example configuration:

preferences.conf

#include <QString>
#include <QStandardPaths>

Preferences {
    General {
        int beatsPerMinute = 60
    }
    Some {
        Inner {
            Group {
                int value = 10
            }
        }
    }
    Harmonica {
        QString partitureFolder = QStandardPaths::writableLocation(QStandardPaths::DocumentsLocation)
    }
}

For those that worked with KConfigXT, it's easy to see how much this is different from the xml that the tool uses. And differently from KConfigXT, the code is smaller, easier to read, and does not rely on magic enums, nor it has a lot of different possibilities to fine tune the settings - if you want to choose between runtime or compile time file, shared vs non shared config, etc.: KConfigXT is for you, mine is supposed to be simple and up to the point.

Konsole is having a resurge in the moment, it's the terminal emulator of choice for the power user that wants to break the 4th wall in *nix systems. Right now it can do almost all the things I want it to do, and a few more.

Since last year you can use splits in Konsole, with full drag & drop support between tabs and windows.

{% include youtube.html id="f9Y1pul8smQ" %}

You can also use Konsole to quickly check for thumbnails of anything that dolphin can show you, just by hovering with the mouse (and depending of your configuration) pressing shift/control/alt. To my knowledge Konsole is the only terminal emulator that supports this.

{% include youtube.html id="8lic9xKG4lo" %}

Some terminals like Tilix and Terminator offers the possibility to split the screen recursively, and I started to add the same thing to konsole. Konsole is usually said to be the swiss army knife of the terminal emulators, and if you didn't try it yet, please do. We offer quite a lot of things that no other terminal emulator offer.

Wayland needs a different mindset when you are programming, you cannot just assume things works the same way as in as X11. One of my first patches to konsole was the rewrite of the Tab Bar, and a different way to deal with Drag & Drop of the tabs. In my mind - and how wrong I was - I could assume that I was dragging to a konsole main window by querying the widget below the mouse.