Kate was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in 2004/2005.
I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge.
In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this?
Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)
Also k3b was an amazing software for burning CDs back then, its interface easily rivaled contemporary proprietary software.
KDE 3.5 was one of the peaks (if not the peak) of graphical interfaces on GNU/Linux.
Experiencing KDE at the time I was used to the Windows XP interface felt amazing, and soon after Vista promises of innovation on interface were nothing compared to what could be done in Compiz (More on the Gnome 2 side).
Yes! When I started using Kate on Linux ca. 2005, I was coming from Notepad on Windows and couldn’t believe how nice it was. I believe it was my first experience of syntax highlighting.
And Amarok! I haven’t thought of that in a while. Losing Amarok was my single biggest regret when I became a Max user. I’ve not used anything since that came close.
You forget, on windows, we had WAMP with phpmysql so we could run queries in our browser. Not being able to do them within an IDE until around 2001 with Dreamweaver and Microsoft InterDev…
Kate is cool but it wasn’t the first to have this.
Interesting. I think it was a couple of years earlier than that(?) when I tried using Kate, but it was so buggy and crashy as to be unusable.
Since I tried it pretty close to its initial release, I'm certain those problems were resolved. However, I developed work habits that didn't include it and so I still don't use it to this day.
If you need to work file based and not project or directory based then you should probably be using Kwrite, which literary is a stripped down version of Kate specifically for this purpose.
I found notepadqq to be a near drop-in replacement for my use of Notepad++ (mostly the visible line endings, find/replace extended characters like \n & \t). The interface is near-identical.
It hasn't been updated in a couple years but haven't run into any bugs in a year+ use.
Kate is such an impressive editor, I’m glad that it’s being worked on and ported to other operating systems, and I didn’t know it had LSP support now! Good to see! If anything happens to BBEdit, Kate may be my next move
I'm using KATE on Linux and BBEdit in macOS to develop in Golang mainly. Kate is snappy, robust and feature packed. It's my go to tool when I don't need a full-blown IDE.
I say this has someone who has used BBEdit since around 1997. And while for the last 15 years I have moved on to primarily using Sublime and then VSCode, I always configure them to be as close to BBEdit as possible, though I can never match BBEdit’s Single/Multi-File Search and Replace or Compare features.
Similarity dispute macOS being my favorite Desktop Environment, KDE has been my primary development DE for the past 2 years. So I really need to give Kate a chance.
> Even if that is a non-free platform, we can reach out to new users and developers that might later be then even interested to switch a full open platform.
KDE developers have always been great with their vision. I guess they will try to create OS Shell that sync users data between different OS? Their applications cover 99% of the casual users, with KDE Connect [0].
KDE Plasma has never clicked with me but KDE applications have always been my choice in a Linux system because of their responsiveness.
Dolphin for Windows[1] also exists but has some issues.
KDE applications still need a lot love on non X11/Wayland systems. Kate got some polish in the last years on Windows, the macOS version still needs more.
Probably like most people here you end up with a collection of tools, so glad Kate exists and really appreciate the high quality and amazing features. Years past you'd have to pay for things like UltraEdit and fight licenses, etc which are a nightmare if you cross boundaries with big companies.
I find myself using Kate, Geany and Notepad++ at different points in time for different tasks across my Windows/macOS/Linux machines.
Kate surprised me a few months ago, I had to write assembly for a fully custom processor whose ISA is not at all industry standard. Kate was able to do the syntax highlighting and with the right color theme and "double-click to highlight" it made the non-trivial changes I needed to make a LOT easier than anything else (VSCode/VSCodium included).
Kate is a lovely editor. I wrote about half of Designing Sound with
Kate before switching to Emacs near the end (to better handle code
integration). What I appreciate is the ability to have a pane of files
open and very quickly cut and paste between them.
Even though I am a baptised and confirmed Emacs disciple, I still
never find the buffer orientation quite maps to files the way I want.
Kate hit that sweet-spot in a file based workflow,
I logged in solely to say that Kate was the main reason I stuck with KDE as my desktop environment, back in the KDE 3 days. I switched to Mac some time ago but I still use Kate as my editor. I'm happy that it still exists.
Kate on MacOS is terrible. I've tried helping them fix the shortcuts which are all "wrong" (MacOS uses certain shortcuts that are unlike most Unix systems, but Kate doesn't actually use the right ones all Mac users expect so it's a nightmare until you manually override at least some of the shortcuts yourself).
I tried using the build tool (suggested in the article) but building Kate was a nightmare even with that... I had to give up after a few days trying random things as suggested by people on the Kate chat (each build was taking hours, then finally failing with some completely inscrutable error).
Even though I really enjoyed using Kate on Linux, as a mainly Mac user I had to forget about it and keep using emacs for random stuff, and IntelliJ for Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart and anything else well supported by Jetbrains.
Kate has been a really good replacement for stuff like VSCode or BBEdit, but it's still got some rough edges on macOS in my experience. I mostly use it on Linux, and the LSP support is actually pretty good. It's definitely a barebones experience without all of the plugin support other editors might have, but if you just need something for writing scripts or editing files it should fit the bill.
Love Kate! Given I _had_ to use Windows on my last job, I promptly installed it. Need multicursor shenanigans, and the lovely search & replace.
Had some trouble with the default theme however (flashbang everytime I opened it). But, a nightly build solved that.
The only problem I have with Kate these days is... its icon. It's been there for years now, and yet my mind still just stops for a noticeable bunch of milliseconds whenever it has to recognize it. For some reason it looks like it represents some brand's useless mobile app rather than a proper utility and my mind somehow refuses to associate it with Kate.
Before we had that, we had a icon that just looked like a text file mime type with zero recognizably.
Even if you used it for a week, you would not be able to know which application is running just looking at the icon. Could be any editor or some word processor.
With the current one, it is clear. And yes, I think that makes sense, that is a brand.
And it is what most other applications do, too. I doubt my mother has any idea what e.g. the Chromium icon means, but once seen a few times, it is clearly recognizable.
For some reason I expected this article to be a horror story of bad behavior from the new community upon porting to other platforms (complaints about the port etc.), and how it wasn't worth the effort.
Glad to see that it's mostly a status update and a call for contributions.
I'd never heard of Kate and wondered if someone could explain what Kate's differentiator is versus other popular editors (e.g., Vim, Emacs, VSCode)? Is there something in particular that sets it apart or is it just a matter of taste?
My favourite Kate feature is sessions. Whatever your working on, you can save the session - including all open files and editor layouts, and restore it later on.
I suppose its a bit of several reasons: for sure taste, but also features, performance, etc. Its a GUI-based text editor, and not a big full-fledged IDE like VSCode. In my opinion, it pretty much follows the KDE philosophy (that I'll poorly paraphrase here) in that: using it and its features in their default settings will be totally fine to use as-is, but - like KDE Plasma for example - there are plenty of features that you can also unlock way beyond the default in order to allow for lots of customization and flexibility. It also is lightweight on resources considering its number of available features; closer to VIM, and lots lighter-weight than say VSCode. Many people would categorize Kate with other text editors like Geany, Notepad++, etc...and I agree with that categorization. Not sure if that helps! Then again, you could always check out some vidoes of Kate in use on youtube, or, if so inclined, perhaps try installing it and give it a run?
I've been using Kate for long time. I try other things but seem to gravitate back to Kate.
It's relatively resource efficient and fast, very full-featured, open source, and I can use it on different OSes and it's pretty much the same everywhere. Also it's GUI, and has a standard GUI UX.
I've never really had any problems with it at all until I started using it on ARM MacOS, where there were some weird bugs with filenames during saves (no corruption or anything, but would default to weird things and occasionally crash if the "wrong" filenames were used); but then the most recent major version seemed to fix all the problems.
Kate + LSP servers can get you really far as a pseudo-IDE. It's one of my favorite editors.
If you want to use it on other platforms, though, you have to dig around Gitlab build artifacts to grab recent successful builds. Looks like that may have changed.
Kate is a surprisingly epic editor. It’s not my primary (vscode) but I use it often to just preview a plaintext file the same way I might use vim or sublime. Love the native rainbow columns in CSV.
Does anybody know why Kate wants to install pulseaudio on OpenBSD? This would be a perfect IDE.
kate-23.08.4:libltdl-2.4.2p2: ok
useradd: Warning: home directory `/var/run/pulse' doesn't exist, and -m was not specified
kate-23.08.4:pulseaudio-17.0p0: ok
kate-23.08.4:pcaudiolib-1.2: ok
kate-23.08.4:espeak-1.51p2: ok
kate-23.08.4:dotconf-1.3p0: ok
kate-23.08.4:py3-xdg-0.28p2: ok
kate-23.08.4:speech-dispatcher-0.11.5: ok
I've been using Kate on macOS and Windows for sometime and it's outstanding this is possible (a cross-platform KDE app). Kate of course on Linux kicks ass as well.
One stupid question: Is anyone aware of how to change the UI "theme" if you're running Kate on macOS or Windows? The 2D, flat icons really look horrible to me.
[+] [-] andmarios|1 year ago|reply
I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge.
In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this?
Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)
[+] [-] jwrallie|1 year ago|reply
KDE 3.5 was one of the peaks (if not the peak) of graphical interfaces on GNU/Linux.
Experiencing KDE at the time I was used to the Windows XP interface felt amazing, and soon after Vista promises of innovation on interface were nothing compared to what could be done in Compiz (More on the Gnome 2 side).
[+] [-] jchmbrln|1 year ago|reply
And Amarok! I haven’t thought of that in a while. Losing Amarok was my single biggest regret when I became a Max user. I’ve not used anything since that came close.
[+] [-] reactordev|1 year ago|reply
Kate is cool but it wasn’t the first to have this.
[+] [-] JohnFen|1 year ago|reply
Since I tried it pretty close to its initial release, I'm certain those problems were resolved. However, I developed work habits that didn't include it and so I still don't use it to this day.
[+] [-] henvic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pests|1 year ago|reply
You're forgetting Pandora somewhere in that timeline, probably between iTunes and Spotify.
That was my first introduction into the concept at least.
[+] [-] cullmann|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|1 year ago|reply
It's dead now.
[+] [-] riidom|1 year ago|reply
Kate fulfills for me the role that Np++ had back in the windows days. I use it when I want to work file based and not project- or directory based.
[+] [-] p4bl0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulsenpai|1 year ago|reply
It hasn't been updated in a couple years but haven't run into any bugs in a year+ use.
[+] [-] kzrdude|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] presbyterian|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] leejoramo|1 year ago|reply
BBEdit is the default editor for me.
I say this has someone who has used BBEdit since around 1997. And while for the last 15 years I have moved on to primarily using Sublime and then VSCode, I always configure them to be as close to BBEdit as possible, though I can never match BBEdit’s Single/Multi-File Search and Replace or Compare features.
Similarity dispute macOS being my favorite Desktop Environment, KDE has been my primary development DE for the past 2 years. So I really need to give Kate a chance.
[+] [-] m0guz|1 year ago|reply
KDE developers have always been great with their vision. I guess they will try to create OS Shell that sync users data between different OS? Their applications cover 99% of the casual users, with KDE Connect [0].
KDE Plasma has never clicked with me but KDE applications have always been my choice in a Linux system because of their responsiveness.
Dolphin for Windows[1] also exists but has some issues.
[0] https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/
[1] https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/
[+] [-] cullmann|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vrinsd|1 year ago|reply
I find myself using Kate, Geany and Notepad++ at different points in time for different tasks across my Windows/macOS/Linux machines.
Kate surprised me a few months ago, I had to write assembly for a fully custom processor whose ISA is not at all industry standard. Kate was able to do the syntax highlighting and with the right color theme and "double-click to highlight" it made the non-trivial changes I needed to make a LOT easier than anything else (VSCode/VSCodium included).
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|1 year ago|reply
Even though I am a baptised and confirmed Emacs disciple, I still never find the buffer orientation quite maps to files the way I want. Kate hit that sweet-spot in a file based workflow,
[+] [-] waqar144|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] patorick002|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brabel|1 year ago|reply
Even though I really enjoyed using Kate on Linux, as a mainly Mac user I had to forget about it and keep using emacs for random stuff, and IntelliJ for Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart and anything else well supported by Jetbrains.
[+] [-] itsautomatisch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] spookie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aspyct|1 year ago|reply
I still have nostalgia with the pink syntax coloring it has (had?) for python!
Thanks a lot to all the contributors, sure had an impact on my life!
[+] [-] ixaxaar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cullmann|1 year ago|reply
Even if you used it for a week, you would not be able to know which application is running just looking at the icon. Could be any editor or some word processor.
With the current one, it is clear. And yes, I think that makes sense, that is a brand.
And it is what most other applications do, too. I doubt my mother has any idea what e.g. the Chromium icon means, but once seen a few times, it is clearly recognizable.
[+] [-] Zambyte|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wkat4242|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pushedx|1 year ago|reply
Glad to see that it's mostly a status update and a call for contributions.
[+] [-] Lyngbakr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sparkie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|1 year ago|reply
It's relatively resource efficient and fast, very full-featured, open source, and I can use it on different OSes and it's pretty much the same everywhere. Also it's GUI, and has a standard GUI UX.
I've never really had any problems with it at all until I started using it on ARM MacOS, where there were some weird bugs with filenames during saves (no corruption or anything, but would default to weird things and occasionally crash if the "wrong" filenames were used); but then the most recent major version seemed to fix all the problems.
[+] [-] IshKebab|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|1 year ago|reply
VSCode is a full-fledged IDE; Kate is much simpler. Think of it as comparable to TextEdit or notepad.exe, but with more features.
It's definitely trending in the VSCode direction, but VSCode is full of surveillance and corporate API clients, and Kate is not.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|1 year ago|reply
If you want to use it on other platforms, though, you have to dig around Gitlab build artifacts to grab recent successful builds. Looks like that may have changed.
[+] [-] kldx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
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)
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)
[+] [-] speakspokespok|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vrinsd|1 year ago|reply
One stupid question: Is anyone aware of how to change the UI "theme" if you're running Kate on macOS or Windows? The 2D, flat icons really look horrible to me.