§ What is Pâté?

Pâté (or just Pate) is a plugin for Kate on KDE3 that allows you to create new plugins in Python for Kate.

What is its use?

Pate makes Kate plugin development simple and intuitive. No more creating a mish-mash of shared libraries, desktop files, rc files, etc... Just create your plugin and drop it in a directory.

A simple example

Create a new file (in your editor of choice ;-)) with the following contents:

import kate

@kate.onAction("Hello World", "Ctrl+H")
def insertHelloWorld():
    currentDocument = kate.document()
    currentDocument.insertText("Hello World!")

Assuming you have Pate installed, save it as helloworld.py (or any name so long as it has a .py file extension) and drop it in ~/.kde/share/apps/kate/pyplugins/. Restart Kate and hit Ctrl+H or click 'Tools->Hello World'. Voilà. Elegant, huh?

What kind of stuff can I make with it?

As the project was originally created to "scratch an itch" (namely, making Kate scriptable easily) it comes with a few bundled scripts. You can view a demo of the included plugins (ogg, 20mb). Some notable scripts are:

§ Download

Pate is available as a source tarball. You can get the latest source from the bazaar repository.

Source tarballs

Bazaar repository

To get the bazaar branch simply run

bzr get http://paul.giannaros.org/bzr/pate

Packages

If anyone wants to make any other kind distro-specific package feel free to mail it to me.

§ Installation

In short:

tar zxf pate-version.tar.gz
cd pate-version/
./configure
cd build/
make && sudo make install

You will need recent versions of sip, PyQt, and PyKDE. Some distros (i.e Mandriva and openSUSE) provide very old versions as they packaged the dismally old ones bundled in kdebindings3. Instructions and some scripts to install them automatically are provided, however!
The build system uses CMake.