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How I use Kate editor

akselmo.dev

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Re: How I use Kate editor

#51

Post by HexDecOctBin »

levodelellis wrote: post #48
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.

I'm writing an editor. Could you explain to me the use case? I looked it up and I don't exactly understand the reason besides it might be fun to look at I really did not like that other editors would lose text if you pressed undo and type. The way my undo's work is if you type "a b c" and hit undo twice (so it's just "a") then type "d", then undo twice, it'll restore to "a b c"

Many times, I write a bunch of code before realising that a lot of it (but not all of it) is incorrect. At this point, being able to switch between two different points of history and selectively copy-paste the stuff that was correct is a godsend.

This is especially useful if you undid some operations, typed a little and then realised that you forgot to copy some important stuff that was strewn around in the old version.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#52

Post by levodelellis »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #51
levodelellis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing an editor. Could you explain to me the use case? I looked it up and I don't exactly understand the reason besides it might be fun to look at I really did not like that other editors would lose text if you pressed undo and type. The way my undo's work is if you type "a b c" and hit undo twice (so it's just "a") then type "d", then undo twice, it'll restore to "a b c"

Many times, I write a bunch of code before realising that a lot of it (but not all of it) is incorrect. At this point, being able to switch between two different points of history and selectively copy-paste the stuff that was correct is a godsend. This is especially useful if you undid some operations, typed a little and then realised that you forgot to copy some important stuff that was strewn around in the old vers…

That's one reason why I implemented it so it wouldn't lose information.

Hmm. I plan to implement a diff. The way I have it, you could copy the current source, hit undo to a version you want to compare again than use the clipboard as the version to diff with (vscode calls this "Compare Active File with Clipboard".) If you mess up you can still hit undo to go through all the previous edits you made since it's not lossy. Would this be as good for your usecase?

Re: How I use Kate editor

#53

Post by HexDecOctBin »

levodelellis wrote: post #52
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times, I write a bunch of code before realising that a lot of it (but not all of it) is incorrect. At this point, being able to switch between two different points of history and selectively copy-paste the stuff that was correct is a godsend. This is especially useful if you undid some operations, typed a little and then realised that you forgot to copy some important stuff that was strewn around in the old vers…

That's one reason why I implemented it so it wouldn't lose information. Hmm. I plan to implement a diff. The way I have it, you could copy the current source, hit undo to a version you want to compare again than use the clipboard as the version to diff with (vscode calls this "Compare Active File with Clipboard".) If you mess up you can still hit undo to go through all the previous edits you made since it's not lossy…

A tree is essentially a nice GUI on top of what you already have. It's allows me to visually click (or navigate) to a specific point of history, instead of remembering to hit Undo 15 times.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#54

Post by creatonez »

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…

Using a runtime doesn't automatically mean it's bloat. I mean, do you uninstall Python from your system immediately after installing a distro?

I would much rather an editor provide as many runtimes as possible for plugins, so that developers from all walks of life can contribute. This is largely the success story of Neovim, which lets you interface with it in 7 different languages. Most editors that are constrained to only one language for plugins have a completely barren ecosystem.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#55

Post by tengbretson »

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…

Do you not use anything at all that has a V8-based JavaScript runtime? Or is it the node-specific things you dislike like their bizarre Stream API?

Re: How I use Kate editor

#56

Post by __mharrison__ »

matthewmc3 wrote: post #36
tux3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You can't navigate to a hidden folder by typing its name (let's not get too creative!). You can, actually. ⌘-SHIFT-G in Finder lets you navigate to any folder by typing in the path - even hidden paths. No mortal user would ever be expected to know or discover that, but it's there.

Finder is annoying for power users. Command shift g is a lifesaver.

I think my favorite file navigator was konqueror.

Another Mac annoyance is that the launch tool (command period) seems to forget apps. Or worse, shows the app as you type the name and hides it if you continue typing the next letter in the name. Not sure what focus group approved this...

Re: How I use Kate editor

#57

Post by bigstrat2003 »

tengbretson wrote: post #55
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you not use anything at all that has a V8-based JavaScript runtime? Or is it the node-specific things you dislike like their bizarre Stream API?

I actively avoid any desktop app that uses JS, yes. I find it to be a silly design choice to use a web language (which the vast majority of people, even its creator, agree is not very good) outside of the context of a web environment. And in my experience such apps are serious memory hogs (like VS Code which takes something like 1 GB of memory to display the same files that take Sublime Text 300 MB).

Re: How I use Kate editor

#58

Post by alex1115alex »

Surprised to see so much love for Kate here. I've always felt it has too much UI clutter for to make for a good Notepad.exe alternative, but too few features to be a good VSCode alternative. It seems most default KDE apps suffer from issues like this, to the point where I ended up using for VSCode for everything on my Linux machine (before eventually switching to MacOS and just using the Notes app for everything that isn't code).

Re: How I use Kate editor

#59

Post by zelphirkalt »

quibono wrote: post #41
badsectoracula wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Kate all the time and IME it doesn't. In fact it struggles even with relatively small files. In fact try this: seq -f"foo %100.100f" 1 1000 > /tmp/test1000 && kate /tmp/test1000 ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file. It seems to be related to the text layout or something along these lines (i.e. it isn't because of whatever data structure it uses for text, modern PCs should be able to handle the naivest…

Just as another data point: I've used Kate for ~90MB JSON files and had no issues at all

Could it be then, that the layout or styling of JSON is performant, while the one for random text is not? But then again what's there actually to style or layout in random text.

Re: How I use Kate editor

#60

Post by watermelon0 »

creatonez wrote: post #54
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using a runtime doesn't automatically mean it's bloat. I mean, do you uninstall Python from your system immediately after installing a distro? I would much rather an editor provide as many runtimes as possible for plugins, so that developers from all walks of life can contribute. This is largely the success story of Neovim, which lets you interface with it in 7 different languages. Most editors that are constrained t…

The main issue is that Zed doesn't package them (or rely on having them installed on the system), but instead downloads binaries from the web.
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