Overview of the Core Interface Design

Overview | Design | Coding Guidelines | Porting to KDE Frameworks 5

The core of the KTextEditor interfaces consists of three main interfaces:

• KTextEditor::Editor (singleton)
  The Editor is a singleton accessed through KTextEditor::Editor::instance(). This singleton allows to create documents, get a document list, and a be informed when a new document is created.
• KTextEditor::Document
  The Document interface represents a single document and enables the creation of views, access to and manipulation of document contents, and access to document extension interfaces.
• KTextEditor::View
  The View provides a widget that displays the contents of a Document, and its interface allows for manipulation of text selection, position of the cursor and mouse, text selections, and behavior of the view. Additionally it provides access to the view extension interfaces.

The hierarchy can be illustrated as follows:

Basic KTextEditor Hierarchy

Notes for KTextEditor Users

To use the KTextEditor framework you first have to get the KTextEditor::Editor singleton through KTextEditor::Editor::instance(). Using this obejct, documents can be created and deleted.

Using KTextEditor as KPart

If linking to KF5::TextEditor is not an option, you can also access the KTextEditor framework as follows

KService::Ptr service = KService::serviceByDesktopPath("katepart");
if (service) {
    m_part = service->createInstance<KParts::ReadWritePart>(0);
}

Notes for KTextEditor Developers

The KTextEditor::Editor has a list of all opened documents and can create new documents. A Document's content is visualized by a KTextEditor::View. A Document can have any number of views (or none). When the content of the document is changed, the change is reflected in all views.

See also

KTextEditor::Editor, KTextEditor::Document, KTextEditor::View

Author

Dominik Haumann <dhaum.nosp@m.ann@.nosp@m.kde.o.nosp@m.rg>