After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

Here are some statistics about KDevelop to entice you to upgrade as soon as possible - of course something we recommend everyone should do!

New Features and Other Notable Changes

This new release has seen lots of work from various contributors. A few noteworthy items are highlighted in the following but this list is far from complete. Try out the new release and see for yourself!

Basic C++11 Support

The new C++ standard, which was released last year, is now partially suppported in KDevelop. At least the parser should not trip over new language features such as initializer lists, lambdas, range-based for loops or variadic templates. Similarily, explicitly defaulted or deleted methods, auto, rvalue-references and many more features are supported. Many of the new stdlib classes can be used as well. Keep in mind though that the new C++ standard contains lots of new features, and we are still lacking support for quite a few things. But we will continue to improve this in the next releases, and provide you with a rock-solid C++11 coding environment.

Editor Restoration

With KDevelop 4.3 we finally catch up with Kate when it comes to closing and reopening files: folded code regions, bookmarks etc. are now properly restored for the last 20 opened files.

Enhanced VCS Integration

Some work went into improving the Version Control System (VCS) integration too, mostly on two fronts—creating a VCS Changes tool view and improving the Review Mode.

VCS Changes show you what files have changed in your project since the last commit. It is useful to keep track of what you are working on and to decide if there should be a commit.

We improved the Review mode by making it more responsive to the user by updating the view while the user is working on the changes.

KDE Projects Integration

The KDE Projects infrastructure was adapted to support projects.kde.org. This provides you with a list of all KDE projects together with the ability to retrieve them in order to start contributing to KDE as fast as possible.

Improved Konsole Integration

The embedded Konsole in KDevelop has seen some improvements—when you use Bash, it is now possible to control the surrounding KDevelop session, i.e. to open files, create new ones, search through files and more. Type help! to find out what you can do there now.

Source Formatting

Integrated source formatting got a bit better—you can now let it override the indentation settings of the embedded editor. Furthermore the "Custom Script Formatter", formerly known to support Gnu Indent, was extended to make it even easier to support custom formatting scripts. One example is the new kdev_format_source.sh script, shipped with KDevelop, which allows fine-grained formatting rules by placing format_sources meta-files into the project's file system. Especially paired with the powerful uncrustify formatter, this enables you to work seamlessly on big, heterogeneously formatted projects.

Various Bugfixes

We fixed over 170 bugs since KDevelop 4.2.3. Among others, SVN 1.7 is now properly supported, various pieces of C++ code got improved, the GDB plugin got better and lots of crashes and other issues were resolved.

Optimizations

Besides adding new features and improving stability, this release also comes with some noteworthy performance improvements—opening large projects with tons of files should be considerably faster now. Similarily, Quickopen is now even faster, and searching with it is more fluid when dealing with large projects.

Forum

Our new forum is the place to go if you need KDevelop support. Our mailing lists as well as the #kdevelop IRC channel on freenode are also available, and we are happy to take your questions.

Wrapup

A big thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible. Many thanks to our users as well, for reporting bugs and making it such a fun and rewarding task to work on KDevelop!