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Kate editor on all platforms

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Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#101

Post by scaryclam »

derbOac wrote: post #43
Lyngbakr wrote: post #26

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?

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 filen…

I didn't know I could use it on MacOS. I recently started a new job where they have nothing but Mac, so I've been looking for a text editor that can do what Kate does. Everything seems to want to do 101 things before basic text editing, rather than just be a simple text editor with optional functionality, so I'm really excited to have Kate installed. I'm really hoping I don't run into too many issues as I've used Kate for years on my home & work setups and would really like to continue using it on mac now.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#102

Post by pimeys »

lytedev wrote: post #64
xvedejas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is still great! I continue to see improvements and KDE6 has some killer features like KDE Connect. (we still don't talk about KDE4 though)

Agreed! I recently switched from a very custom Linux setup with a tiling window manager and all kinds of bells and whistles. The Plasma 6 release in combination with running NixOS which makes trying things out both easily and safely convinced me to give it a shot and I simply haven't left. It took some setup, of course, but Plasma is wonderfully configurable and has everything I wanted available with some tweaking. W…

Exactly what happened to me too! Been using a Sway setup on NixOS for many many years, and I was just curious to try out Plasma 6. After a small config change, I had the desktop up and running, and I was impressed how it felt like. You can even use plasma-manager to store your KDE settings to a nix configuration, which make it easy to have a unified configuration across different computers.

https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#103

Post by adrian_b »

The_Colonel wrote: post #79
xvedejas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is still great! I continue to see improvements and KDE6 has some killer features like KDE Connect. (we still don't talk about KDE4 though)

KDE4 is a sad story. It ruined the reputation of KDE for a very long time. I loved KDE 3.5, but then came back to KDE only in 2021. It's mostly just a problem of communication. KDE 4.0 should not have been marked as stable and should not been used by distros. If they baked KDE4 for two more years and on the side maintained/developed 3.5, the transition might be much smoother.

While there were some bugs in early KDE 4, those were not the main problem.

No amount of baking could have saved it.

The main problem was caused by the completely different purposes of the new developers, who have removed all the outstanding customization features of KDE 3.5.

For me, indeed KDE 3.5 has been the best graphic desktop that I have ever seen. Neither before, nor after and neither on Apple or Windows have I encountered anything as good.

The main reason for this was that KDE 3.5 allowed extreme customization, so you could make your own graphic desktop that did not resemble at all the default desktop.

After the shock of experiencing the garbage KDE 4, even if I had waited a half of year before making the transition, with the hope that any major bugs would be solved, I have reverted to KDE 3.5 for a few years, until it had become much to painful to make upgrades in such a way as to not damage it.

Then I have switched to XFCE, which does not provide as much as the old KDE 3.5, but at least it does not get in the way of your work with undesirable and hard to remove features. Moreover, any useful KDE applications, such as Kate, work perfectly fine on XFCE, together with any useful Gnome applications.

The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application has characterized the developers who have converted the Mozilla browser into Firefox, which is another unwelcome change that I have greatly hated.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#104

Post by tvshtr »

bluGill wrote: post #70
jchmbrln wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amarok is preparing for another release. I wonder if it will come to mac.

Yeah, that's a surprising revival. I thought it died for good this time.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#105

Post by tvshtr »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #83
andmarios wrote: post #45

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". I…

> Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. It's dead now.

It got revived suddenly, there's going to be a new release soon.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#106

Post by petepete »

andreyv wrote: post #84
The_Colonel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this thought stopping argument again. X11 is garbage which nobody wants to maintain, let alone develop. It's a very archaic design which is patched via extensions to sorta support some modern concepts which negate the network transparency anyway. Both Wayland and systemd have a very wide developer consensus, because they finally provide a maintainable solution to their respective problems. The drama is constructe…

Old does not mean bad. Even a decade later Wayland struggles to provide basic features that were built in the X protocol.

Which ones do you have in mind? I don't miss X in the slightest.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#107

Post by pests »

andmarios wrote: post #45

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". I…

> It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function.

You're forgetting Pandora somewhere in that timeline, probably between iTunes and Spotify.

That was my first introduction into the concept at least.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#108

Post by distances »

Symbiote wrote: post #98
jraph wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was coming from Notepad on Windows Ouch. You didn't use Notepad++?

Notepad++ would have been very new at that time. I don't know what those early releases were like. But there were similar editors. I remember using SCIte which was similar to Notepad++. SCIte was first released in 1999.

My editor of choice back in the Windows days was EditPlus, from 1998 (and looks like it's still maintained). I think it had syntax highlighting from the start too.

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#109

Post by brabel »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #95
brabel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

That sounds more like switching to macos being terrible. If I am used to kate on linux, windows,..., then I expect it to just work if someone hands me a mac with kate. If you additionally want mac-style shortcuts as an option that is fine, but defaults should be consistent.

There's no app that uses the same shortcuts in all OSs because that's just stupid (amongst other reasons, because the shortcuts would conflict with the OS's own shortcuts, just to mention one obvious reason). You need to default to the OS's defaults, and maybe have an option to try using another OS's defaults (like other IDEs do).

Re: Kate editor on all platforms

#110

Post by lproven »

Symbiote wrote: post #98
jraph wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was coming from Notepad on Windows Ouch. You didn't use Notepad++?

Notepad++ would have been very new at that time. I don't know what those early releases were like. But there were similar editors. I remember using SCIte which was similar to Notepad++. SCIte was first released in 1999.

Notepad++ is based on Scintilla, for which Scite is sort of the demo program. Scintilla is also the basis of Geany.

I explained this recently on the Reg. Read the Reg. ;-)

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/veteran_editors_notep...

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