monline

Recently I've posted on how to use External Tools in Kate. I wanted to use the word count example script that is described in the article about "DCOP scripting the Kate application". But it didn't work. Of course I did not give up and finally made my version that works.

First of all, in current version of Kate (which is 2.5.6 at the moment of writing) the use of *.desktop files (as described in the article) does not work. I tried it a number of times (both in my own $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kate/scripts directory and in the global /usr/share/apps/kate/scripts directory) and could not make Kate recognize and automatically add my script to the menu. Of course if one would read thoroughly enough ... Before the article there's a warning in italics that tells you what I've discovered on my own. The *.desktop files are past and you've to manually add your script in "Configuration / External Tools".

Create a new entry in Ext. Tools and add the following properties:

• Label: Word count
• Script: kate-wordcount.sh
• Executable: kate-wordcount.sh
• Mime types: <can be left empty>
• Save: none
• Command line name: word-count

Now create a script in a terminal and name it kate-wordcount.sh. The script should contain the following:

Put this script to a directory that is in your $PATH variable and you're all done. Clicking "Word count" in External Tools will pop up a dialog window containing the line, word and character counts of the active document in Kate.

PS: thanks to airwin for the tip with the set command. I tried to split the output of wc into variables with read, but apparently it sucks when used in a pipe (at least in sh and bash, however it works in zsh). airwin pointed out that it works if I put read in parenthesis (eg. cat somedoc.txt | wc | (read lines words chars; echo "Lines: $lines\nWords: $words\nCharacters: $chars")), but set seemed to be an even better solution.