Hi,

Not really sure if that's the best place to post about it, but I just wanted to get this out somewhere and hopefully get useful feedback.
It's been bothering me since the switch to KDE4, but never took the time to complain about it/search where to complain about it.

I used to be a huge fan of KDevelop and Kate before KDE4, especially because of the great search and replace tools they offered.
Now it seems that those have been replace by the little popup at the bottom of the window.

The old KDE3 KDevelop had a fantastic search&replace in multiple files (or project files) tool.

It listed matches and how they would be changed. A checkbox next to each match allowed you to remove lines you didn't want to change. Clicking on a match made the editor jump to the corresponding file and line.
And of course it supported regular expressions.

It has now been completely crippled in KDE4, both for Kate and KDevelop.

The Kate search and replace dialog was also better before switching to KDE4 (understood things like ^$ for empty lines for instance).

Current alternatives I found are:
kfilereplace
regexxer

The awesome kregexpeditor is also gone...

So just for reference, the features the ultimate search&replace app/plugin should have:

1) regular expressions (*)
2) multiple files (directory pattern, file pattern, recursive, exclude directories, files, hidden stuff)
3) list changes
4) some form of line by line confirmation (checkbox, dialog, etc)
5) automatic backup creation
6) search only
7) multiple lines pattern support
8 ) regexp editor (or tester at least)

Ok, that's all I can think of right now.

(*) including start/end of line ("^" and "$")), newline ("\n"), groups ("()"), backreferences (\1,\2,etc), full match backreference (\0)
Should also allow replacing newlines or adding newlines, i.e. support for "\n" in search and replace patterns.

So, does anybody know if some of the old functionality is still going to be added to the new Kate and KDevelop or if Kregexpeditor has been ported to KDE4?
Or of any other awesome (GUI) alternatives?


I do still use Kate and the new search and replace is acceptable (and does have some advantages), but I mostly miss some possibilities, like the regexp editor and replacing newline characters.

P.S.: Just for reference, some comments I posted before coming here:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3933/
P.P.S.: I'm actually even back to Gnome at the moment, due to all kinds of problem with KDE (more specifically Kubuntu).

re: kregexpeditor viewtopic.php?f=20&t=89228&p=165170&hilit=kregexpeditor#p165170

re: problems with Kubuntu - there are many other distro's with kde if you find Kubuntu's implementation problematic. What version of Kde were you running that was problematic?

Thanks for the info about kregexpeditor.
I just installed an old version of it and it still works: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/kregexpeditor
I don't understand why they removed a working package from the repositories. O.o

Found related bug reports:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/299905
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178643

re: problems with Kubuntu - there are many other distro's with kde if you find Kubuntu's implementation problematic. What version of Kde were you running that was problematic?

KDE v4.5.1 with latest Ubuntu 10.10

My main problem at the moment is the flickering when using desktop effects, notably scale/expose.
It happens in KDE (Kwin effects), but not in Gnome (compiz).

It used to work in Kubuntu 10.04, but that was before my NVidia card stopped working (not sure if it's a card or PCI slot problem).
At the moment, I'm stuck with the onboard ATI graphics card:

Code: Select all

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 2100 [1002:796e] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
   Subsystem: Giga-byte Technology Device [1458:d000]
   Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
   Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
   Latency: 32, Cache Line Size: 4 bytes
   Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 18
   Region 0: Memory at d8000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
   Region 2: Memory at fdfe0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
   Region 4: I/O ports at ee00 [size=256]
   Region 5: Memory at fde00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
   Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
   Capabilities: <access denied>
   Kernel driver in use: radeon
   Kernel modules: radeon


I also had problems with Gnome at the beginning, which were fixed after installing an older version of the xserver-xorg-video-ati:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... st10088239
This did unfortunately not fix the flickering issue.

Note: Generally speaking, my best experiences with KDE were with Debian and OpenSUSE, but that was before the KDE4 era.
And my main reasons for using KDE are the clipboard history (Klipper) and Kwin scale effect for only the current desktop or all desktops + minimized windows. (Gnome/KDE apps run in any desktop environment and I'm not a purist, so that's not a big criteria for me. Still, overall, I found KDE apps to be really good and have almost all features I needed, if not more.)

kregexpeditor probably removed from repo because it was kde3 in a kde4 world and no longer supported

compiz is not Gnome specific, if you wish you can run kde with compiz. use either fusion-icon, systemsettings (default apps -> windows manager") or the command "compiz --replace&" to start it

kde4.5.1 is a bit old, current is 4.5.3 (bunch of bug fixes, etc ....) you should up to it

you can always return to openSuse - my experience with it has been very good

I still prefer the debian package management.
Maybe it's just that I "grew up" with Debian and not RPM-based stuff.

But I already downloaded the latest OpenSUSE just in case. I might multi-boot into it eventually, as well as lots of other distros I still want to test once I find the time.

However that's getting a bit off-topic.

I finally found something mentioning the missing features in KDevelop 4!:
http://www.kdevelop.org/mediawiki/index ... ison_table

"Project wide find and replace tool" still missing in action...

Just tried installing Kdev3, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do it. Older packages create conflicts.

KIAaze wrote:I finally found something mentioning the missing features in KDevelop 4!:
http://www.kdevelop.org/mediawiki/index ... ison_table
(

that looks outdated (2005), kdevelop is now at 4.1 http://dot.kde.org/2010/10/26/kdevelop- ... ntegration

Installed KDevelop 4.1 from source following your message, but I can't even create a new project in it now: No Project->New option.
Also couldn't see anything in the menus for project-wide search&replace.

I got 2 error messages I don't remember the first time I ran it. Removing ~/.kde/share/apps/kdev* and ~/.kdevduchain/ didn't bring back the error messages.
Will try to figure out why some other time.

I'd also note that the 10.04 has older binaries and that the Linux 2.6.34 kernel, GCC 4.5, and Mesa 7.8.2 can make a big difference in graphics benchmarks http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... arks&num=4

Also you might wish to open a new thread focusing only on your scale/expose issues here viewforum.php?f=111

I have used Regexp's in Kate for a long time in the KDE 4 series ( although only for replace, not find )

Make sure to change "Mode" to "Regular Expression"

Me too. But I clearly remember missing some features when I first switched to it (I did find the regexp mode).
I can't verify it now, but it seems to me that the old version allowed newline characters in the replace string (i.e. splitting comma separated values into separate lines for example) and understood things like "^$".
Anyway, there definitely seemed to be some differences.
+ the integration with kregexpeditor helped a lot

I haven't abandoned Kate, but I did abandon KDevelop (simply used Kate+CLI instead (didn't work on a large project for a while, so it was sufficient)).
I really miss the project-wide search and replace.

KIAaze wrote:I can't verify it now, but it seems to me that the old version allowed newline characters in the replace string (i.e. splitting comma separated values into separate lines for example) and understood things like "^$".
Anyway, there definitely seemed to be some differences.

I can't search for ^$ (although \n\n works fine), but I can put \n in the replace text. There were some bugs with newlines in early versions of kde 4.5, you may be seeing one of those.

TheBlackCat

Is version 4.5.1 considered an early version. I'm using that and Ubuntu 10.10 and I find that: yes you can insert /n (a newline) if you have escape sequences selected but then of course you can't use regular expressions to find what you want to replace. But you can not search for a blankline using /n or /n/n--nor can you search for it as an regex using ^$ which I think is some kind of standard.... Isn't it?

I give up. The only reason I use KDE is because of Kate and Konqueror. Konqueror in 4.5 is passable but Kate is a disaster and not only with regex searches. BTW this is not the only problem with regex searches in Kate.

I've been trying to turn Kate into a usable tool for 4 months now and the non-functionality of regex searches is the final straw. I'm going back to KDE 3.5 which at least does the basic stuff that you need for daily work.

I've tried every major version of KDE, 4.0 to 4.5. This time I'm going to wait until KDE 5.0 at least before I try it again.

KDE 4 is cute, but cute don't pay the bills and get the work done.

Well, the latest stable version is KDE 4.5.4, there were a lot of bugfixes since KDE 4.5.1, you should maybe update your version.

^$ searches finds blank lines in Kate for 4.6 beta 2. Regular expression searches involving \n were broken in 4.5.1, not because they were removed but because of a bug. They are fixed by 4.5.2.

So

1) regular expressions -- works, including all the features you listed later
2) multiple files (directory pattern, file pattern, recursive, exclude directories, files, hidden stuff) -- doesn't work, but someone could make a plug-in that does this
3) list changes -- works
4) some form of line by line confirmation (checkbox, dialog, etc) -- doesn't work, but once again could use a plugin. But you can just do the replace line-by-line and either replace it or skip it, so I don't see the big deal here.
5) automatic backup creation -- kate already saves backup files by default
6) search only - already works, including multiple files with regular expressions
7) multiple lines pattern support -- already works
8 ) regexp editor (or tester at least) -- not available as a separate application, but you could easily make a blank document with test lines in it, and the right-click menu has a list of regular expression parts you can use, so you really don't need a separate program for this

So the only things you request that it cannot currently do is find and replace over multiple files (it can do find, with regular expressions), and check boxes for which lines you want to change.

Have you submitted feature requests for either of these?

(Sorry for the late reply. I was just going through some old unread mail and found the thread update. ^^')

That's good news about Kate. I'm still at KDE 4.5.1 because I use standard Ubuntu 10.10, however I might try getting the latest version if I'm motivated enough.

But what about KDevelop? Any news on the project-wide search and replace?

And no, I haven't submitted any feature requests yet, as I'm not sure where to do it.