Kate seems like yet another editor trying to be everything to everyone while mastering nothing. The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That's not simplicity; it's the same complexity with different branding. And let's be honest - if your workflow requires JavaScript snippets to generate blog headers, you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore.
How I use Kate editor
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: How I use Kate editor
#62there is one feature that I truly miss from notepad++ and couldn't find it in kate.
the feature is the option to bookmark all matching lines in the find dialog, then from the bookmarks submenu you can delete bookmarked lines or delete unbookmarked lines.
super useful, yet couldn't find it in any other editor.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#63Kate seems like yet another editor trying to be everything to everyone while mastering nothing. The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use. That's not simplicity; it's the same complexity with different branding. And let's be honest - if your workflow requires JavaScript snippets to generate blog headers, you're not using a "simple" text editor anymor…
> The author complains about VSCode's extensions clashing, but then proudly lists a dozen Kate plugins they use.
That makes sense; when I was reading this I inferred that VSCode's extensions were clashing, making him loath to use it, but Kate's were not.
> That's not simplicity […] you're not using a "simple" text editor anymore
Kate has literally "advanced" in its name. KWrite exists for those who need simplicity.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#64there is one feature that I truly miss from notepad++ and couldn't find it in kate. the feature is the option to bookmark all matching lines in the find dialog, then from the bookmarks submenu you can delete bookmarked lines or delete unbookmarked lines. super useful, yet couldn't find it in any other editor.
You have this in vim. It’s called “the quickfix list.”
Granted, it’s not as obvious to use as NP++ I’m sure. And it’s actually a generalized feature that works for more than just searches. But it does automatically get populated whenever you :grep in vim.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, that sounds pretty bad. I wonder if there's a reason...
Re: How I use Kate editor
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was definitely Zed. I forget what it was that used node.js, and I was able to disable that with some effort. But it annoyed me because I shouldn't have to, you know? In my opinion the default out of the box install should be sleek and not use many resources, and only add more stuff if I ask for it.
Zed maintainer here. We use node.js to run a number of language servers and formatters (which are often written in node due to the VSCode ancestry...). There've been a lot of requests to disable language servers by default; but I think that's not the right default for most users – things should work out of the box. That said, better control over this is definitely something we will add.
Is it true Zed downloads node.js as a binary from the web? Why wouldn't you use the system provided node or package it with Zed if it's necessary?
Re: How I use Kate editor
#67I‘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.
What I can't get over with Sublime is how it's $99 for an editor license, while IntelliJ is €169. It doesn't feel value for money.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
AFAIU, it also allows you to redo, even if you accidentally added a letter after undoing. That accidental edit then adds a branch to the tree instead of replacing all the redo entries.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#69The page doesn't say it, how well it handles very large files? Also, how does it handle editing files with various encodings? Asking this while having Notepad++ in mind.
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…
> ...and watch Kate struggle with a ~100KB file
What do you consider as struggle? Here this works fast and flawless with Kate, VS Code, vim... Though, I did not use /tmp, but $HOME. But I doubt this would make a difference, unless your KDE is broken and Kate struggles because of kio on opening the file.
Re: How I use Kate editor
#70If you have an M3/M4 and are stuck on XNU like me, and you want a something between the notes app and a whole Electron IDE, it turns out that Kate also supporte macOS (Actually, a lot of KDE programs do, I was elated to find out I could use Dolphin as file manager when I was limited by Finder) I think Kate strikes this really nice middleground. It starts up immediately as just a text editor, but you can push it as fa…
There was also coteditor, which is based on swift ui.