Kate isn't a particularly good editor and it's scripting language is quite lacking. The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely

Kate isn't a particularly good editor and it's scripting language is quite lacking. The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely relying on a terminal protocol are obvious: - ability to have fonts of different sizes - ability to listen to more complicated keyboard shortcuts - cleaner ways of opening popups - ability to combine multiple fonts - support for more colors The downside of such a more complex protocol is that it's more involved to tunnel it over a network and doing attaching to X11 is also quite a bit more complicated than doing it to a terminal program.