Inline Spellcheck in Kile

Can someone explain to me why Kile still doesn’t have inline spell checking capabilities? Recently, this feature has become an ubiquitous utility, and it’s presence in Firefox 2.0 really drives the point home. If my web browser can correct my spelling as I type in a text field, why would my primary typesetting software which I use for compiling research papers would not have it?

Analogous windows based LaTex IDE’s such as Texnic Center had this capability for years now. It is a shame and disgrace. Kile is near damn close to perfection when it comes to usability, features, and ease of use. It is simply the best Tex editing suite out there. But the lack of an inline spellchecking is just kills it for me.

I can’t really blame Kile developers for this. Kile depends on KatePart – the fundamental KDE text editor component which provides a common text editing API for embedding in other applications. Editors such as Kate, KWrite, Konqueror, KDevelop, and Quanta all use that very same module. KatePart is primarily a basic text and code editor with basic syntax highlighting, and folding features. It’s supposed to be something akin to nedit or one of the windows based Notepad replacement applications like EditPlus, Notepad2 or TextPad. I can see how inline spellchecking might be a low priority concern for the KatePart team. Most people could probably live without it and never even notice that it is missing from Kate or Kwrite.

But Kile on the other hand is primarily a word processing application, designed for writing books and reports. It’s the type of software that suffers without inline spellcheck. Kile development team should really look into implementing some sort of solution here.

I know that implementing this feature from scratch might be hard, but they don’t need to do that. It has been done before – in the KMail email composer for example. I’m not sure if that app actually uses KatePart, but either way – it is not impossible.

Someone out there should look into either designing inline spellcheck from scratch or (if possible) porting that KMail email composer code, and contributing it to KatePart project. I’m calling “not it” on this whole thing, cause my C skillz are sub par, and I have no experience in coding for KDE apps. So it’s up to you people to make it happen.

[tags]kde, kile, kate, katepart, kwrite, kmail, quanta, kdevelop, spellcheck, inline spellckeck, spelling[/tags]