Looking for a mentor to develop an app for KDE

Hello,
I am Karl and I actually work as a web developer. I am looking for a mentor here to help me with 1) developing a new app for KDE.
2) Integrating a similar function into KMail.

The proof of concept is already finished, my main goal now is to develop it in a way that makes it suitable for the community so that it can be included in the next release. I don’t have any problems with development itself, but there’s always more to learn.

The app uses local Llama and can hot-swap “any” model.

A picture says a thousand words at this point, I think.

I am looking forward to hearing from someone who would like to mentor me a bit and guide the process through.

Best regards, Karl

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You should probably mention where the source code is.

Also: Adding a new KDE project | Developer

Hi :slight_smile:

You should try to contact Laurent who maintains KMail. He build a complex plugin system for the editor in the composer: messagecomposer/src · master · PIM / PIM Messagelib · GitLab

Note that KMail already has an integration with various translations tools (Online and offline)

You will easily find his email address from the git log of kmail/messagelib :slight_smile:

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Given you background in web development I am wondering if your proof of concept has a backend/frontend split.

Because that could be a good starting point of making this more widely available than “just” KMail.

Something like a user session (or even system wide) service that application can send text to, plus maybe a simple Qt based API to do the communication.

@carl might then want to add this to Tokodon, NeoChat, Merkuro, … :smiley:

Some of these might even be easier to “get into” as a new developer, even if KMail is your actual target

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Thank you for the hints.

The thing is that it’s really extremely simple.
I wrote the prototype in Golang and it took 2 hours. About 300 lines of code.

Then some tinkering to get it into Krunner.

It simply uses ollama. Therefore, there is already a Global service.
For this, maybe some kind of global wrapper for all KDE apps would be good, so that the models the user wants can be defined once appropriately.

Just like Kleopatra for encryption perhaps.

But what I really want here is to find a mentor, the world of KDE is too complicated for me, professionally I have to do everything alone :wink: Also I can not code in cpp, I am a lesser mind :smiley:

I thought the project could be interesting enough. Alone the idea that KDE natively supports local (and optionally also online LLM APIs, like Mistral, Gemini or OpenAI), while other distributions and Microsoft struggle.

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