The great thing about open source is that… it’s open.

When I was browsing the internet just now, I dropped in on KDE Dot News. In the rightside column, there is a feed of new KDE software from KDE-apps.org. A new version of my favoriate music player, amarok, lured me to the KDE-apps website, where I saw rkward is latest announcement. The funny name, and the categorization as scientific, triggered some interest on my side, and it turned out to be a graphical frontend to my favorite statistics program, R.

Ok, they had a Debian package, and the debian/ build dir in the tar.gz so I downloaded it and started making a Kubuntu 5.10 package. While doing this I saw some notice about the R syntax highlighting used, which conflicts with the older version in the Kate packages.

Then I realized that a long time ago, I wrote such syntax highlighting for Kate, so my attention was lured again. And, indeed, they use my syntax highlighting, though extended later (somewhere down the page).

And this makes me happy. The syntax highlighting was useful to me in the past, but apparently to a lot of other people too. And because I released it as GPL, back then, it now appears in rkward! Yes, a really like open source :)

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2005/11/r-gui-rkward.html.