7 ms·

How I use Kate editor

228 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

pvg 2y ago
Big thread a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Kate Text Editor and OrgMode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899978 - July 2024 (1 comment) Kate editor on all platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 - April 2024 (153 comments) Kate Editor Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 - Aug 2023 (18 comments) Integrated Terminal on Windows in KDE Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 - Feb 2023 (23 comments) Using Kate's Git Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34624765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34624765 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Kate – New Features – August 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 - Aug 2022 (1 comment) Kate 22.08 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 - July 2022 (6 comments) Kate is a fantastic text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) KDE Advanced Text Editor: A Feature-Packed Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 - April 2021 (1 comment) Kate Editor: Search In Files and Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) The Kate Text Editor in 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 - Dec 2020 (5 comments) The Kate text editor is 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 - Dec 2020 (81 comments) Kate is soon 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 - Nov 2020 (12 comments) Kate – A Qt Text Editor for Linux, MacOS and Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 - March 2018 (2 comments) Kate Turning 10 Years Old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 - Aug 2011 (20 comments)
actuallyalys 2y ago
I don’t think it will dethrone Neovim for me, but this makes me wonder whether Kate could become my second editor and allow me to largely drop VS Code, especially with the DAP support. The session support also looks interesting.
- arendtio 2y ago
  Well, I use KDE for a while now, but one thing I've always tried to avoid was Kate ;-) My primary editor is vim (cli), and my secondary editor is kwrite. Nowadays, I think kwrite is part of the Kate package, just simpler, as I don't like the whole session feature when you just want to edit a single file.
  - ognarb 2y ago
    Kwrite is basically kate without any plugins. Both applications are hosted in the same repo and developed at the same time.
- nartho 2y ago
  Have you tried zed ? I have been really impressed by it.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    I have tried zed, and promptly uninstalled once I saw it was automatically downloading and running nodejs. I want an editor that is lightweight, not one that starts running extra crap I neither need nor want in the background. That was on top of the big focus on LLM integration (itself already a significant negative for me), but which I was willing to overlook to try out the rest. I don't think Zed is very good in its current state. Too much extra cruft out of the box which you need to disable.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Zed on my Mac is taking 180MB of RAM right now. That's far less proportionally than Emacs use to be teased about.
sangpugogogo 2y ago
I've been using Kate for quick edits but never explored its deeper features. The LSP integration and session handling look particularly useful. Good to see a thoughtful workflow built around a lightweight editor that doesn't compromise on functionality.
tux3 2y ago
If you have an M3/M4 and are stuck on XNU like me, and you want a something between the notes app and a whole Electron IDE, it turns out that Kate also supporte macOS (Actually, a lot of KDE programs do, I was elated to find out I could use Dolphin as file manager when I was limited by Finder) I think Kate strikes this really nice middleground. It starts up immediately as just a text editor, but you can push it as far as you want to
- oidar 2y ago
  How did you get dolphin to run on a Mac? If you could point me to a resource that would help me out, I'd appreciate it.
  - tux3 2y ago
    This is the documentation for building a KDE app from source: https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-builder-compile/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-bu... I had to install several dependencies through homebrew, ignore some default dependencies that don't make sense on mac (wayland, pipewire, etc), and then it worked. The build command I used, for reference: kde-builder dolphin --ignore-projects wayland plasma-wayland-protocols wayland-protocols kglobalaccel kpipewire kwayland selenium-webdriver-at-spi baloo packagekit-qt baloo-widgets Note also there's some mac weirdness with the Dock where some kioworker process might show up as a separate icon. I packaged it in dolphin.app MacOS bundle, gave kioworker a Info.plist with LSUIElement=true, and that got rid of the Dock glitch. So, I wouldn't say it's entirely painless to install. But if you're sufficiently annoyed by Finder, building Dolphin can be worth the effort.
    - whalesalad 2y ago
      That is a lot of work just to use Dolphin. I daily drive KDE on my workstation and while it is not a terrible file explorer, I probably wouldn't go to those lengths to use it over Finder. Props for getting it done though, I didn't even realize it was possible. Makes sense though considering a lot of KDE apps are cross platform, like kdenlive.
larusso 2y ago
I‘m contemplating for a while to find a replacement for VSCode. I switched to it because Atom became too slow and it had great builtin support for most stuff. But I actually was never 100% happy. I usually split my work between bigger projects and smaller file edits. And VSCode was good for the second flow. But over the years and the popularity of LSPs it kinda became dump as well. I mean the fact that if one wants to edit a python or ruby file and simply wants code formatting and a semi smart intelli sense one needs to install an lsp plus plugin etc etc. Which used to work out of the box without bigger configuration. I work on different types of projects and need a fast and quick editor from time to time. VSCode used to be that for me. But now it’s bloated as a full IDE in some cases. Will look into Kate just to see what it has to offer.
- tanelpoder 2y ago
  TIL about Kate editor, but after 30 years of just using vi in a terminal (Unix, Mac, even Windows in cmd.exe) I switched to Zed editor (https://zed.dev https://zed.dev). I had tried other editors in the past, but quickly fell back to vi/vim after a few hours or days, for various reasons. Been using Zed for a couple of months now and no plans to go back. It also uses LSPs, but whenever I connect to some (Linux) dev host from Zed on my Mac, it autoinstalls clangd to a .local directory and so far I haven’t had to manually install any extra software. Just took a while to figure out the best Zed config for me. It’s very configurable, customizable, but the UI itself is snappy & clean (written in Rust, for those who care about it).
  - israrkhan 2y ago
    I also really like Zed. But what prevents me from switching to Zed, is my workflow. I tend not to run desktop GUI applications on my main development machine (headless and sometimes remote). nvim is excellent in such circumstances. Also nvim is available on all platforms. I know Zed is also recently available on Linux, but I really doubt it will be as good as Zed on Mac.
    - ash-ali 2y ago
      One of the biggest problems i have with running basic text editors like vim/nvim is the investment time to spin up a fully loaded workable development env; esp since i've never done it before. basic vim with some modifications in .vimrc is all i have and i know some of my colleagues are also this way! nowadays though i really want to use LLMs to write code for me instead of switching contexts on different platforms. can i ask what you use for LLM stuff on nvim? how do you like it compared to running bare bones vim and switching platforms?
rgrieselhuber 2y ago
Kate editor is a hidden gem.
eviks 2y ago
> I remember having two CMake extensions where both had something I needed, but they both also overlap in some basic features, so it got very confusing. The easy strictly equivalent solution is to just one extension. Or does Kate have a single included plugin that covers everything those two extensions cover?
bornfreddy 2y ago
Wow, that's an app name I haven't heard in quite some time! Glad to hear it is still alive and kicking. I see it has a proper multicursor support, so that's nice. There are a few plugins in vscod(e/ium) I regularly use and would miss a lot - like converting between camel/kebab/snake/sentence case, generating sequence numbers/digits, and especially calculations. I'd be surprised if these minor things are supported... Still, long time ago it was already a very capable IDE, so I'm curious where it is now. I'll give it a spin...
bobajeff 2y ago
Kate's a pretty good editor. I've made an attempt to replace vscode/vscodium with it once before. The article is right about vscode turning into proprietary mush. I use vscodium and have run into issues with plugins that require cpptools, while cpptools complains whenever you, or an extension you're using, accesses it in an editor other than vscode.
- leo-notte 2y ago
  how was your experience with kate as a full vscode replacement? anything major you missed or had to work around?
  - bobajeff 2y ago
    It's been awhile but I remember there were things I was used to, some really nice things, that I didn't want to give up. I love vscode's markdown editing features. (pasting a link over text to create a hyperlink or dragging and dropping image files to embed images etc.) I think some of the keyboard shortcuts I was used to were different (duplicating lines, selecting all occurrences of a selected text). Behavior of word/token traversing(Ctrl + Left|Right Arrow) was different. There were some things kate couldn't do at all that I don't remember.
bogwog 2y ago
This is pretty much the exact same way I use Sublime (except the git diff stuff is done in Sublime Merge, which is a separate application) I've tried switching to Kate a few times since I prefer open source tools, but it feels like a major step down UX-wise. My primary workstations have been Linux with KDE Plasma for many years, but I am not a huge fan of the KDE aesthetics (which seems to aim for maximizing clutter). I'm generally not a picky person, but my text editor is by far my most-used tool, so it's an exception.
- dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  I like that you can extend Sublime with Python. I know that it will never be Emacs, but Emacs is too hard for me, while Sublime feels much more accessible.
HexDecOctBin 2y ago
One feature that is impossible to live without for me is Undo Tree. Unfortunately, the only editors that support it are Vim/Neovim and Emacs. I would love to switch to one of these modern editors, but not a single one of them supports this feature.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  You don't get a visible tree representation, but JetBrains at least saves every change to your files regardless of how they were edited and whether any changes were reverted. It produces a flat list though, but you do get diffs and it works across all edited files, not just the current one (it's basically a built-in mini-VCS). https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html
- HexDecOctBin 2y ago
  EDIT: Actually, there is one more: https://fred-dev.tech/ https://fred-dev.tech/ But it's still deep in development, I'm keep an eye on how it turns out.
- levodelellis 2y ago
  I'm writing an editor. Could you explain to me the use case? I looked it up and I don't exactly understand the reason besides it might be fun to look at I really did not like that other editors would lose text if you pressed undo and type. The way my undo's work is if you type "a b c" and hit undo twice (so it's just "a") then type "d", then undo twice, it'll restore to "a b c"
  - HexDecOctBin 2y ago
    Many times, I write a bunch of code before realising that a lot of it (but not all of it) is incorrect. At this point, being able to switch between two different points of history and selectively copy-paste the stuff that was correct is a godsend. This is especially useful if you undid some operations, typed a little and then realised that you forgot to copy some important stuff that was strewn around in the old version.
smusamashah 2y ago
The page doesn't say it, how well it handles very large files? Also, how does it handle editing files with various encodings? Asking this while having Notepad++ in mind.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  I use Kate all the time and IME it doesn't. In fact it struggles even with relatively small files. In fact try this: seq -f"foo %100.100f" 1 1000 > /tmp/test1000 && kate /tmp/test1000 ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file. It seems to be related to the text layout or something along these lines (i.e. it isn't because of whatever data structure it uses for text, modern PCs should be able to handle the naivest of naive text editor structures even when editing a few MBs without sweat) because the slowness is triggered whenever text is about to be displayed (e.g. when scrolling) or lines are added/removed (modifying a single line is fine, but if you move say to the middle of the file, press Enter and keep it down you'll see that it struggles to add new lines). I'm only using for editing text files and source code so it rarely bothers me personally but it can be annoying sometimes.
  - quibono 2y ago
    Just as another data point: I've used Kate for ~90MB JSON files and had no issues at all
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      Could it be then, that the layout or styling of JSON is performant, while the one for random text is not? But then again what's there actually to style or layout in random text.
  - slightwinder 2y ago
    > ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file What do you consider as struggle? Here this works fast and flawless with Kate, VS Code, vim... Though, I did not use /tmp, but $HOME. But I doubt this would make a difference, unless your KDE is broken and Kate struggles because of kio on opening the file.
ryukoposting 2y ago
I used Kate as my main editor several years back, before switching to Sam halfway through college, then to VS Code when I wanted debugging stuff. I'll have to give it another try, I always liked it. Its multi-cursor support still strikes me as being better than VS Code's.
alex1115alex 2y ago
Surprised to see so much love for Kate here. I've always felt it has too much UI clutter for to make for a good Notepad.exe alternative, but too few features to be a good VSCode alternative. It seems most default KDE apps suffer from issues like this, to the point where I ended up using for VSCode for everything on my Linux machine (before eventually switching to MacOS and just using the Notes app for everything that isn't code).
- IIsi50MHz 2y ago
  Fortunately, the UI is quite configurable. You can disable the left sidebar, the top toolbar, edit them, and so on. Document map is also optional. But yes, my initial impression was of more UI than expected.
otistravel 2y ago
Kate seems like yet another editor trying to be everything to everyone while mastering nothing. The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That's not simplicity; it's the same complexity with different branding. And let's be honest - if your workflow requires JavaScript snippets to generate blog headers, you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore.
- bmn__ 2y ago
  > The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That makes sense; when I was reading this I inferred that VSCode's extensions were clashing, making him loath to use it, but Kate's were not. > That's not simplicity […] you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore Kate has literally "advanced" in its name. KWrite exists for those who need simplicity.
AbuAssar 2y ago
there is one feature that I truly miss from notepad++ and couldn't find it in kate. the feature is the option to bookmark all matching lines in the find dialog, then from the bookmarks submenu you can delete bookmarked lines or delete unbookmarked lines. super useful, yet couldn't find it in any other editor.
- jcgl 2y ago
  You have this in vim. It’s called “the quickfix list.” Granted, it’s not as obvious to use as NP++ I’m sure. And it’s actually a generalized feature that works for more than just searches. But it does automatically get populated whenever you :grep in vim.

228 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

pvg 2y ago

Big thread a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Kate Text Editor and OrgMode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899978 - July 2024 (1 comment) Kate editor on all platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 - April 2024 (153 comments) Kate Editor Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231529 - Aug 2023 (18 comments) Integrated Terminal on Windows in KDE Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824467 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Kate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 - Feb 2023 (23 comments) Using Kate's Git Features - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34624765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34624765 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Kate – New Features – August 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 - Aug 2022 (1 comment) Kate 22.08 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 - July 2022 (6 comments) Kate is a fantastic text editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29623909 - Dec 2021 (1 comment) KDE Advanced Text Editor: A Feature-Packed Text Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972858 - April 2021 (1 comment) Kate Editor: Search In Files and Multi-Threading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) The Kate Text Editor in 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25592677 - Dec 2020 (5 comments) The Kate text editor is 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424735 - Dec 2020 (81 comments) Kate is soon 20 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030096 - Nov 2020 (12 comments) Kate – A Qt Text Editor for Linux, MacOS and Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16558407 - March 2018 (2 comments) Kate Turning 10 Years Old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 - Aug 2011 (20 comments)

actuallyalys 2y ago

I don’t think it will dethrone Neovim for me, but this makes me wonder whether Kate could become my second editor and allow me to largely drop VS Code, especially with the DAP support. The session support also looks interesting.

arendtio 2y ago
Well, I use KDE for a while now, but one thing I've always tried to avoid was Kate ;-) My primary editor is vim (cli), and my secondary editor is kwrite. Nowadays, I think kwrite is part of the Kate package, just simpler, as I don't like the whole session feature when you just want to edit a single file.
- ognarb 2y ago
  Kwrite is basically kate without any plugins. Both applications are hosted in the same repo and developed at the same time.
nartho 2y ago
Have you tried zed ? I have been really impressed by it.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  I have tried zed, and promptly uninstalled once I saw it was automatically downloading and running nodejs. I want an editor that is lightweight, not one that starts running extra crap I neither need nor want in the background. That was on top of the big focus on LLM integration (itself already a significant negative for me), but which I was willing to overlook to try out the rest. I don't think Zed is very good in its current state. Too much extra cruft out of the box which you need to disable.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Zed on my Mac is taking 180MB of RAM right now. That's far less proportionally than Emacs use to be teased about.

sangpugogogo 2y ago

I've been using Kate for quick edits but never explored its deeper features. The LSP integration and session handling look particularly useful. Good to see a thoughtful workflow built around a lightweight editor that doesn't compromise on functionality.

tux3 2y ago

If you have an M3/M4 and are stuck on XNU like me, and you want a something between the notes app and a whole Electron IDE, it turns out that Kate also supporte macOS (Actually, a lot of KDE programs do, I was elated to find out I could use Dolphin as file manager when I was limited by Finder) I think Kate strikes this really nice middleground. It starts up immediately as just a text editor, but you can push it as far as you want to

oidar 2y ago
How did you get dolphin to run on a Mac? If you could point me to a resource that would help me out, I'd appreciate it.
- tux3 2y ago
  This is the documentation for building a KDE app from source: https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-builder-compile/ https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-bu... I had to install several dependencies through homebrew, ignore some default dependencies that don't make sense on mac (wayland, pipewire, etc), and then it worked. The build command I used, for reference: kde-builder dolphin --ignore-projects wayland plasma-wayland-protocols wayland-protocols kglobalaccel kpipewire kwayland selenium-webdriver-at-spi baloo packagekit-qt baloo-widgets Note also there's some mac weirdness with the Dock where some kioworker process might show up as a separate icon. I packaged it in dolphin.app MacOS bundle, gave kioworker a Info.plist with LSUIElement=true, and that got rid of the Dock glitch. So, I wouldn't say it's entirely painless to install. But if you're sufficiently annoyed by Finder, building Dolphin can be worth the effort.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    That is a lot of work just to use Dolphin. I daily drive KDE on my workstation and while it is not a terrible file explorer, I probably wouldn't go to those lengths to use it over Finder. Props for getting it done though, I didn't even realize it was possible. Makes sense though considering a lot of KDE apps are cross platform, like kdenlive.

larusso 2y ago

I‘m contemplating for a while to find a replacement for VSCode. I switched to it because Atom became too slow and it had great builtin support for most stuff. But I actually was never 100% happy. I usually split my work between bigger projects and smaller file edits. And VSCode was good for the second flow. But over the years and the popularity of LSPs it kinda became dump as well. I mean the fact that if one wants to edit a python or ruby file and simply wants code formatting and a semi smart intelli sense one needs to install an lsp plus plugin etc etc. Which used to work out of the box without bigger configuration. I work on different types of projects and need a fast and quick editor from time to time. VSCode used to be that for me. But now it’s bloated as a full IDE in some cases. Will look into Kate just to see what it has to offer.

tanelpoder 2y ago
TIL about Kate editor, but after 30 years of just using vi in a terminal (Unix, Mac, even Windows in cmd.exe) I switched to Zed editor (https://zed.dev https://zed.dev). I had tried other editors in the past, but quickly fell back to vi/vim after a few hours or days, for various reasons. Been using Zed for a couple of months now and no plans to go back. It also uses LSPs, but whenever I connect to some (Linux) dev host from Zed on my Mac, it autoinstalls clangd to a .local directory and so far I haven’t had to manually install any extra software. Just took a while to figure out the best Zed config for me. It’s very configurable, customizable, but the UI itself is snappy & clean (written in Rust, for those who care about it).
- israrkhan 2y ago
  I also really like Zed. But what prevents me from switching to Zed, is my workflow. I tend not to run desktop GUI applications on my main development machine (headless and sometimes remote). nvim is excellent in such circumstances. Also nvim is available on all platforms. I know Zed is also recently available on Linux, but I really doubt it will be as good as Zed on Mac.
  - ash-ali 2y ago
    One of the biggest problems i have with running basic text editors like vim/nvim is the investment time to spin up a fully loaded workable development env; esp since i've never done it before. basic vim with some modifications in .vimrc is all i have and i know some of my colleagues are also this way! nowadays though i really want to use LLMs to write code for me instead of switching contexts on different platforms. can i ask what you use for LLM stuff on nvim? how do you like it compared to running bare bones vim and switching platforms?

rgrieselhuber 2y ago

Kate editor is a hidden gem.

eviks 2y ago

> I remember having two CMake extensions where both had something I needed, but they both also overlap in some basic features, so it got very confusing. The easy strictly equivalent solution is to just one extension. Or does Kate have a single included plugin that covers everything those two extensions cover?

bornfreddy 2y ago

Wow, that's an app name I haven't heard in quite some time! Glad to hear it is still alive and kicking. I see it has a proper multicursor support, so that's nice. There are a few plugins in vscod(e/ium) I regularly use and would miss a lot - like converting between camel/kebab/snake/sentence case, generating sequence numbers/digits, and especially calculations. I'd be surprised if these minor things are supported... Still, long time ago it was already a very capable IDE, so I'm curious where it is now. I'll give it a spin...

bobajeff 2y ago

Kate's a pretty good editor. I've made an attempt to replace vscode/vscodium with it once before. The article is right about vscode turning into proprietary mush. I use vscodium and have run into issues with plugins that require cpptools, while cpptools complains whenever you, or an extension you're using, accesses it in an editor other than vscode.

leo-notte 2y ago
how was your experience with kate as a full vscode replacement? anything major you missed or had to work around?
- bobajeff 2y ago
  It's been awhile but I remember there were things I was used to, some really nice things, that I didn't want to give up. I love vscode's markdown editing features. (pasting a link over text to create a hyperlink or dragging and dropping image files to embed images etc.) I think some of the keyboard shortcuts I was used to were different (duplicating lines, selecting all occurrences of a selected text). Behavior of word/token traversing(Ctrl + Left|Right Arrow) was different. There were some things kate couldn't do at all that I don't remember.

bogwog 2y ago

This is pretty much the exact same way I use Sublime (except the git diff stuff is done in Sublime Merge, which is a separate application) I've tried switching to Kate a few times since I prefer open source tools, but it feels like a major step down UX-wise. My primary workstations have been Linux with KDE Plasma for many years, but I am not a huge fan of the KDE aesthetics (which seems to aim for maximizing clutter). I'm generally not a picky person, but my text editor is by far my most-used tool, so it's an exception.

dr_kiszonka 2y ago
I like that you can extend Sublime with Python. I know that it will never be Emacs, but Emacs is too hard for me, while Sublime feels much more accessible.

HexDecOctBin 2y ago

One feature that is impossible to live without for me is Undo Tree. Unfortunately, the only editors that support it are Vim/Neovim and Emacs. I would love to switch to one of these modern editors, but not a single one of them supports this feature.

homebrewer 2y ago
You don't get a visible tree representation, but JetBrains at least saves every change to your files regardless of how they were edited and whether any changes were reverted. It produces a flat list though, but you do get diffs and it works across all edited files, not just the current one (it's basically a built-in mini-VCS). https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/local-history.html
HexDecOctBin 2y ago
EDIT: Actually, there is one more: https://fred-dev.tech/ https://fred-dev.tech/ But it's still deep in development, I'm keep an eye on how it turns out.
levodelellis 2y ago
I'm writing an editor. Could you explain to me the use case? I looked it up and I don't exactly understand the reason besides it might be fun to look at I really did not like that other editors would lose text if you pressed undo and type. The way my undo's work is if you type "a b c" and hit undo twice (so it's just "a") then type "d", then undo twice, it'll restore to "a b c"
- HexDecOctBin 2y ago
  Many times, I write a bunch of code before realising that a lot of it (but not all of it) is incorrect. At this point, being able to switch between two different points of history and selectively copy-paste the stuff that was correct is a godsend. This is especially useful if you undid some operations, typed a little and then realised that you forgot to copy some important stuff that was strewn around in the old version.

smusamashah 2y ago

The page doesn't say it, how well it handles very large files? Also, how does it handle editing files with various encodings? Asking this while having Notepad++ in mind.

badsectoracula 2y ago
I use Kate all the time and IME it doesn't. In fact it struggles even with relatively small files. In fact try this: seq -f"foo %100.100f" 1 1000 > /tmp/test1000 && kate /tmp/test1000 ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file. It seems to be related to the text layout or something along these lines (i.e. it isn't because of whatever data structure it uses for text, modern PCs should be able to handle the naivest of naive text editor structures even when editing a few MBs without sweat) because the slowness is triggered whenever text is about to be displayed (e.g. when scrolling) or lines are added/removed (modifying a single line is fine, but if you move say to the middle of the file, press Enter and keep it down you'll see that it struggles to add new lines). I'm only using for editing text files and source code so it rarely bothers me personally but it can be annoying sometimes.
- quibono 2y ago
  Just as another data point: I've used Kate for ~90MB JSON files and had no issues at all
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    Could it be then, that the layout or styling of JSON is performant, while the one for random text is not? But then again what's there actually to style or layout in random text.
- slightwinder 2y ago
  > ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file What do you consider as struggle? Here this works fast and flawless with Kate, VS Code, vim... Though, I did not use /tmp, but $HOME. But I doubt this would make a difference, unless your KDE is broken and Kate struggles because of kio on opening the file.

ryukoposting 2y ago

I used Kate as my main editor several years back, before switching to Sam halfway through college, then to VS Code when I wanted debugging stuff. I'll have to give it another try, I always liked it. Its multi-cursor support still strikes me as being better than VS Code's.

alex1115alex 2y ago

Surprised to see so much love for Kate here. I've always felt it has too much UI clutter for to make for a good Notepad.exe alternative, but too few features to be a good VSCode alternative. It seems most default KDE apps suffer from issues like this, to the point where I ended up using for VSCode for everything on my Linux machine (before eventually switching to MacOS and just using the Notes app for everything that isn't code).

IIsi50MHz 2y ago
Fortunately, the UI is quite configurable. You can disable the left sidebar, the top toolbar, edit them, and so on. Document map is also optional. But yes, my initial impression was of more UI than expected.

otistravel 2y ago

Kate seems like yet another editor trying to be everything to everyone while mastering nothing. The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That's not simplicity; it's the same complexity with different branding. And let's be honest - if your workflow requires JavaScript snippets to generate blog headers, you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore.

bmn__ 2y ago
> The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That makes sense; when I was reading this I inferred that VSCode's extensions were clashing, making him loath to use it, but Kate's were not. > That's not simplicity […] you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore Kate has literally "advanced" in its name. KWrite exists for those who need simplicity.

AbuAssar 2y ago

there is one feature that I truly miss from notepad++ and couldn't find it in kate. the feature is the option to bookmark all matching lines in the find dialog, then from the bookmarks submenu you can delete bookmarked lines or delete unbookmarked lines. super useful, yet couldn't find it in any other editor.

jcgl 2y ago
You have this in vim. It’s called “the quickfix list.” Granted, it’s not as obvious to use as NP++ I’m sure. And it’s actually a generalized feature that works for more than just searches. But it does automatically get populated whenever you :grep in vim.