About Frescobaldi

Frescobaldi is named after Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), an Italian organist and composer.

History of Frescobaldi

Frescobaldi has its roots in LilyKDE, which was a plugin for KDE3's editor Kate. LilyKDE was written in Python and released in 2007 on Christmas.

When KDE developed version 4, it was not immediately possible to make Kate plugins in Python. So LilyKDE became a standalone application, wrapping the Kate texteditor part, and was renamed to Frescobaldi. It still used the Okular KDE part to display PDF documents. Frescobaldi 0.7 was the first public release, on Christmas 2008. On Christmas 2009 version 1.0.0 was released and on Christmas 2010 version 1.2.0.

At that time it was decided to move away from the KDE4 libraries and just use Python and Qt4 which are easily available on all major computing platforms. Frescobaldi 2.0 is a complete rewrite from scratch, and was released at Christmas 2011.

Frescobaldi 2 had many releases from 2011 to 2017, where lots of functionality was added and many improvements were made. During these years, more developers joined initial author and core developer Wilbert Berendsen to work on Frescobaldi.

A great effort was done to port Frescobaldi to Python3 and Qt5, which brought more stability and durability, and better multilingual support. As a result, Frescobaldi 3 was released in Feburary 2017.

In 2017, Frescobaldi was accepted in the Google Summer Of Code project, where a number of students contributed significantly.

In 2019, Frescobaldi and some supporting libraries were moved to the frescobaldi organisation on GitHub, reflecting that Frescobaldi now really is a community-supported Free Software project.