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How I use Kate editor

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Re: How I use Kate editor

#21

Post by bigstrat2003 »

larusso wrote: post #8

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 t…

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.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#22

Post by ash-ali »

israrkhan wrote: post #18
tanelpoder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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?

Re: How I use Kate editor

#23

Post by bogwog »

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.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#24

Post by whalesalad »

tux3 wrote: post #13
oidar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#25

Post by oidar »

tux3 wrote: post #13
oidar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Thank you. I'll give it a go.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#26

Post by leo-notte »

bobajeff wrote: post #15

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.

how was your experience with kate as a full vscode replacement? anything major you missed or had to work around?

Re: How I use Kate editor

#27

Post by tux3 »

whalesalad wrote: post #24
tux3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#28

Post by HexDecOctBin »

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.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#29

Post by homebrewer »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #28

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.

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

Re: How I use Kate editor

#30

Post by kstrauser »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #20
nartho wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried zed ? I have been really impressed by it.

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 it…

Zed on my Mac is taking 180MB of RAM right now. That's far less proportionally than Emacs use to be teased about.
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