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KTextEditor plugin

The Dragoman KTextEditor plugin translates the selected text in place, offline, through the Dragomand daemon. KTextEditor is the editor component behind Kate, KWrite and KDevelop, so one plugin serves all of them. It adds three commands to the Tools menu, downloads a missing language pair on first use with its progress shown in the editor, and never overwrites text you changed while a translation was running.

It is developed as its own project, dragoman-ktexteditor, and packaged in the same repository as Dragomand. It is a separate package, so installing the daemon never pulls in KDE dependencies.

Requirements

Dragomand. The plugin does no translation itself: it talks to the daemon over D-Bus, and the daemon starts on demand. The package depends on dragomand, so installing the plugin installs the daemon too.

KDE Frameworks 6. The plugin is built for Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 (6.13 or newer), which is what current Kate and KDevelop releases use. The Kate Flatpak cannot load plugins installed on the system; use Kate from your distribution.

Install

Add the Dragomand repository first, as described on the Install page, then install the dragoman-ktexteditor package:

sudo zypper install dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo dnf install dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo apt install dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo pacman -S dragoman-ktexteditor

Packages are built for x86-64 everywhere and for 64-bit ARM wherever the repository has ARM builds. Updates arrive with your normal system updates.

Enable the plugin

The editor does not enable new plugins by itself:

  • Kate: open Settings, then Configure Kate, then Plugins, check Dragoman Translator and click OK.
  • KDevelop: open Settings, then Configure KDevelop, then Plugins, and check Dragoman Translator.

The Tools menu now has the three translation commands.

Using it

Select some text and choose Tools, then Translate Selection, or press Ctrl+Alt+T. The translation replaces the selection.

  • Translate Selection (Choose Languages) opens a dialog listing every language pair the daemon offers, installed or available for download. It saves the chosen pair and translates the selection with it. Until you choose a pair, it is Bulgarian to English.
  • Swap Translation Direction reverses the saved pair.
  • The direction follows the text. For a pair whose languages use different scripts, such as Bulgarian and English, Translate Selection checks the selected text: mostly Latin text with a Cyrillic source language, or the other way round, translates in the reverse direction. Selecting English text translates it into Bulgarian without swapping first.
  • Your edits are safe. If the document changes while a translation runs, the result goes to the clipboard instead of into the document, and a message says so.
  • Empty lines are kept, so paragraphs stay paragraphs.
  • Pivoting is reported. When no direct model exists and the daemon translates through English, a message names the pivot language.

The first translation in a language pair downloads its model from Mozilla; a message in the editor shows the progress, and the editor stays usable meanwhile. After that the pair works offline. To skip the download, install the pair's model package (see Language models).

One request holds at most 256 lines and 1 MiB of text. For longer documents use dragomanctl (see Command line).

The saved pair lives in the editor's own configuration file, in a [Dragoman] group: ~/.config/katerc for Kate, ~/.config/kdeveloprc for KDevelop.

Removing

Uncheck Dragoman Translator in the editor's Plugins settings, or remove the package:

sudo zypper remove dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo dnf remove dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo apt remove dragoman-ktexteditor
sudo pacman -R dragoman-ktexteditor

The daemon and its models stay installed.

Build from source

Building needs CMake 3.24, extra-cmake-modules, Qt 6.8 and KDE Frameworks 6.13 or newer (Config, CoreAddons, I18n, TextEditor and XmlGui). From a dragoman-ktexteditor checkout:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build
sudo cmake --install build

Restart the editor afterwards and enable the plugin as described above.

Troubleshooting

Dragoman Translator is not in the Plugins list. Restart the editor completely: close every window, then start it again. Check that the package is installed and that you are not running the Flatpak build.

The Tools menu has no translation commands. The plugin is installed but not enabled; see Enable the plugin.

"Select the text to translate first." Select text before translating.

"Block selections cannot be translated." Switch off block selection mode (Ctrl+Shift+B) and select the text again.

"The selection is too large for one request." Translate the text in smaller pieces, or the whole file with dragomanctl.

"The translation daemon reports no language pairs." The daemon is unreachable or has no provider. Check it from a terminal:

dragomanctl status
dragomanctl pairs

"Translation failed: ..." The message comes from the daemon. On a first use it usually means the model download failed: check the network, or install the pair ahead of time with dragomanctl install bg-en (or its model package), then try again.

The wrong direction comes out. The script check only reverses pairs whose languages use different scripts. Choose the pair explicitly with Translate Selection (Choose Languages), or use Swap Translation Direction.

For problems with the daemon itself, see Troubleshooting.