A lot of good things happen at the moment in Kate’s development. We didn’t only implement plenty of new features for 21.04 and fix a lot of bugs in the last months and year, we did improve our overall product branding, too. Early in 2020, we introduced a new Kate icon designed by Tyson Tan to get some icon that is instantly recognizable compared to the generic ones we used in the past.
Well, it’s not hugely popular nor does it have tons of money behind it, so if you’re looking for an editor with hundreds of plugins, you’ll be disappointed here.
But if you’re looking for a text editor that’s open-source, not heavy on resources and not arcane (a.k.a. Vim or Emacs), then it’s among the most powerful you can find.
And like, that’s one of my favorite aspects of it. There isn’t much of a “switch” necessary. It largely behaves in obvious ways. It’s a utility, not a life investment.
If you are on KDE/Plasma there is not real way around it anyway. Kate is more or less two parts…the kate shell and the KTextEditor framework. And the KTextEditor framework is used in several programs…kdevelop, kwrite, kile…I think also kmail uses it for writing emails.
So I don’t really use kate that much directly…for single config file edits I use kwrite and for development usually kdevelop. But improvements to kate usually make it to those programs through KTextEditor as well so I am always happy about new kate versions.
As standalone programming editor kate works well enough. It’s old and mature. Lacks some features of sublime and has some others sublime lacks. If you are into vim the vi-mode of kate (actually KTextEditor, works in other programs too) might be interesting. I still prefer a full IDE like kdevelop, I can’t do without their variable-highlighting anymore but kate is a very capable editor for programming nonetheless.
But before I posted here I showed Kate to a friend of mine that does programming and he was surprised that this hadn’t been more featured, him usually using VScode. But I haven’t heard if it made it possible for him to stop using VScode.
They also have a IRC where you can talk with the team; #kate at irc.kde.org)
There might be someone here who can answer something more clear, but it’s worth a try I think.
What’s your experience with it? Is it worth it to switch, or is there not so much support?
Well, it’s not hugely popular nor does it have tons of money behind it, so if you’re looking for an editor with hundreds of plugins, you’ll be disappointed here.
But if you’re looking for a text editor that’s open-source, not heavy on resources and not arcane (a.k.a. Vim or Emacs), then it’s among the most powerful you can find.
And like, that’s one of my favorite aspects of it. There isn’t much of a “switch” necessary. It largely behaves in obvious ways. It’s a utility, not a life investment.
If you are on KDE/Plasma there is not real way around it anyway. Kate is more or less two parts…the kate shell and the KTextEditor framework. And the KTextEditor framework is used in several programs…kdevelop, kwrite, kile…I think also kmail uses it for writing emails.
So I don’t really use kate that much directly…for single config file edits I use kwrite and for development usually kdevelop. But improvements to kate usually make it to those programs through KTextEditor as well so I am always happy about new kate versions.
As standalone programming editor kate works well enough. It’s old and mature. Lacks some features of sublime and has some others sublime lacks. If you are into vim the vi-mode of kate (actually KTextEditor, works in other programs too) might be interesting. I still prefer a full IDE like kdevelop, I can’t do without their variable-highlighting anymore but kate is a very capable editor for programming nonetheless.
I like Kate a lot, it starts up very fast. I use it for one-off editing (or looking into) files.
lol I’m not a programmer myself
But before I posted here I showed Kate to a friend of mine that does programming and he was surprised that this hadn’t been more featured, him usually using VScode. But I haven’t heard if it made it possible for him to stop using VScode.
They also have a IRC where you can talk with the team; #kate at irc.kde.org)
There might be someone here who can answer something more clear, but it’s worth a try I think.