kde

GSoC Status Report (Week 2): Moving Assistants Infrastructure

Kevin Funk

• 3 min read

Hey,

In the first two weeks of my GSoC I've spent time on moving out lots of code from the current C++ language support into kdevplatform (the base of KDevelop, which contains all the non-language agnostic, reusable components for the IDE).

Task recap: Assistants / Refactoring

  • Rename assistant: When you change a local variable name, this assistant renames all uses of it, too. This feature is mostly non-language-agnostic, so it makes sense to refactor it in a way it gets available for all supported languages. Currently, this feature is only available in oldcpp, being less useful than it could be.

  • Adapt signature: Similar to above – when changing the signature of a function at the declaration/definition, this offers adapting the corresponding definition/declaration signature. This probably doesn't fit for a non-language-agnostic assistant (because of C++-specific bits required when adapting signatures), hence we need to port this over from oldcpp to clangcpp.

  • Declare function/member/variable: When you use some undeclared function/member/variable, we offer you to create a private/public/local declaration of that as appropriate.

  • Rename File: When you rename a class and the file it was declared in matches the old identifier, we offer you to rename the file in accordance.

Achievements

An image is worth a thousand words, so let me quickly show you a screenshot of the rename assistant in action:

KDevelop screenshot
KDevelop showing the rename assistant when attempting to modify some identifier. By pressing Alt+1, the first action is selected and foo in line 4 will be changed to foo1

Prior to my change, these assistants basically were only useful to the C++ language support. The infrastructure (the controller for showing/hiding the popups) resided in the C++ plugin. But funnily, for example the Python plugin accidently re-used parts of the old C++ language support and hence was able to show these assistants, too. However, whenever we're using the Clang plugin we have to disable the original C++ language support, which suddenly exposed that there's something wrong (i.e. the assistants didn't show up anymore). So, I had a look at it and in the end we've decided that this is useful for all languages and agreed to move this API into kdevplatform.

So, in fact, that change gave us the possibility to base all assistants we have in place on a common interface (called StaticAssistant) and a central place for registering those to the session (via StaticAssistantsManager). The full diff can be seen here: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/118542/ (kdevplatform change).

While this change has basically nothing to do with KDevelop-Clang itself, it still helps to provide a better experience with the Clang plugin enabled. Just let me show you this helpful assistant popup:

KDevelop screenshot
KDevelop showing a hint provided by Clang diagnostics (problem here: missing semicolon at the end of the line)

or this little guy here:

KDevelop screenshot
KDevelop showing a hint provided by the missing-include-resolver assistant (problem here: unknown type)

Note: As you can see, there's a small issue in this screenshot. It doesn't actually show the error text anywhere. It just proposes how to fix it. That's an issue we were already discussing.

What I personally would love to see is to be able to embed widgets in-between the lines in the editor that show the actual error. Working with a bit with Coverity (a static analysis tool) lately, I've found this way of representing errors quite convenient. I've already been in touch with the Kate guys in order to (hopefully) get that implemented at some point.

Wrap-up

So, while these two weeks consisted more of a refactoring work on existing code, it still needed to be done. Any change which cleans up architectural issues in KDevelop land actually makes us really happy.

For the next two weeks I'm focusing on getting all the Code Completion features (see my original blog post for reference) into KDevelop-Clang.

By the way, if you enjoy what we're working on in KDevelop these days, or what people do in KDE in general, please consider donating to a fundraiser helping us to organize a meeting for bringing KDE/KDevelop forward. Your help is greatly appreciated!

Here's the link: http://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2014/

Thanks!