[HN Gopher] How I use Kate editor
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How I use Kate editor
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-04-20 20:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (akselmo.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (akselmo.dev)
| pvg wrote:
| Big thread a year ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Kate Text Editor and OrgMode_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899978 - July 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kate editor on all platforms_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40032869 - April 2024 (153
| comments)
|
| _Kate Editor Features_ -
| 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 - Feb 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kate_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34697173 - Feb
| 2023 (23 comments)
|
| _Using Kate 's Git Features_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34624765 - Feb 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kate - New Features - August 2022_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585221 - Aug 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kate 22.08_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219281 -
| July 2022 (6 comments)
|
| _Kate is a fantastic text editor_ -
| 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 - April 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Kate Editor: Search In Files and Multi-Threading_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969409 - Jan 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Kate Text Editor in 2020_ -
| 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 - Dec 2020 (81
| comments)
|
| _Kate is soon 20 years old_ -
| 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 - March 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Kate Turning 10 Years Old_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876471 - Aug 2011 (20
| comments)
| actuallyalys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Kwrite is basically kate without any plugins. Both
| applications are hosted in the same repo and developed at the
| same time.
| nartho wrote:
| Have you tried zed ? I have been really impressed by it.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| israrkhan wrote:
| I have been using neovim extensively for past several years. I
| also use vscode occasionally. Last year I tried Zed and was
| very impressed with its speed, responsiveness and featureset.
| Now it is available for Linux has well, but I have not tried
| linux version yet.
| sangpugogogo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is the documentation for building a KDE app from source:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| In fairness, I wouldn't say it's dolphin I'm attached to
| in particular, I think I'm just not in the target
| audience for Finder.
|
| The tradeoff is that it makes simple things simple, and
| everything else complicated.
|
| I'm uploading a config file on a website. It's in
| ~/.config, and any reasonable file explorer won't show
| hidden files by default. In Finder there's also no button
| or setting to show hidden files. They really can't, it
| would make the UI complicated.
|
| You can't navigate to a hidden folder by typing its name
| (let's not get too creative!). The file dialog box lets
| you type file names, as Jobs intended, anything else is
| an error.
|
| This won't be news to anyone, as most people will have
| run into it before. Most people probably remember that
| the hidden shortcut is Command + Shift + Period. But
| everything in Finder is like this, and I'm just reminded
| at every turn that I am the person Finder was
| specifically not built for.
|
| So, it's just not for me.
| oidar wrote:
| Thank you. I'll give it a go.
| larusso wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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). 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Haven't used Kate, but I strongly recommend Sublime Text. It's
| lightweight and the plugin support means you can add more
| features if you need them.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Kate editor is a hidden gem.
| eviks wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| how was your experience with kate as a full vscode replacement?
| anything major you missed or had to work around?
| bogwog wrote:
| 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.
| HexDecOctBin wrote:
| 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.
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