The Kate text editor is 20 years old

Yup. I remember Kate and Notepad++ being my two GUI choices before moving to vim at some point when my work focused more on Unix systems administration work.

When I used Kate last mounting remote files was done with fish:// and used SSH creds and sftp.

You don't have to use the Vim editor itself, but to not take advantage of Vim key bindings is a huge miss if you're doing programing work. Most modern editors have plugins that enable them. Personally I've been using Intellij with the Vim plugin.

I'm not sure what the best way to learn is, but try `vimtutor` on your shell and keep open a Vim cheat sheet like the one here: http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/

I haven't used it in a while, but I remember Kate as having very good vi keybindings (maybe not over-the-top in features, but reliable and not crashing is more than even several big-name editors can claim).

There's also Notepadqq

Tangential, but I'm quite happy you put "literally unusable" in quotes and made it clear you were talking about your own use case, and not criticizing the product as a whole based on how you prefer to work. Too often do I see people make the weird assumption that how they work is how everybody works, the proceeds to trash a product based on that assumption.

> I used to love Kate, during the time of KDE 3.5.

Same here. It greatly helped my move to a Linux-only desktop.

> With KDE 4, Kate became "literally unusable" for me

It's been a long time since the release of KDE 4, but that was what did it for me too (it's been so long I don't remember the specifics). I was able to keep using the 3.x version for a while. Once that started to become an issue, I moved basically everything to Geany. I just checked and I don't even have it installed - hard to believe, given how much I used to use it.

I have used Kate and it is pretty nice.

What does Kdevelop do that I won't get with Pycharm?

agreed, Kdevelop which uses Kate is the only IDE I know that is able to parse properly really complex C++ code (projects that clion or visual studio or vscode would just crash on)

You can navigate documents, and change where you're editing using a mouse.

I would expect an IDE you have completion built in.

In Emacs you need to configure LSP, which is a non-trivial task.

I have no idea how Kate rates in that aspect, have never used it. Suprised to hear that it's still alive (but that doesn't mean negatively surprised).

Same reason there's a thriving market of other editors really, horses for courses. People use best what they use most, sometimes they make a conscious decision about it and sometimes they just fall into it. I imagine that a lot of tools are just used without much questioning, and that's fine. The basic feature sets of text editors are pretty much the same. Write, delete, move, copy, paste, save, create.

The main benefit is about choice, I keep a stack of text editors around just out of curiosity, because I like playing with software and editors and sometimes you find features you think are neat, and then go off to try and replicate them in your main editor or tool. Open source software is good at communicating ideas and text editors as a whole have really improved each other over the last three or four decades.

Kate isn't a particularly good editor and it's scripting language is quite lacking.

The reasons both Emacs and Vim have a Qt version as well instead of purely relying on a terminal protocol are obvious:

- ability to have fonts of different sizes

- ability to listen to more complicated keyboard shortcuts

- cleaner ways of opening popups

- ability to combine multiple fonts

- support for more colors

The downside of such a more complex protocol is that it's more involved to tunnel it over a network and doing attaching to X11 is also quite a bit more complicated than doing it to a terminal program.

As I recall, Kate is quite similar to Windows editors. It should be more familiar to users that have switched over to Linux from Windows, while still being quite feature rich. It is definitely a valuable editor in the Linux ecosystem

Well for one it means you don't have to deal with modes. Mouse/scrolling support is usually a lot better in GUIs than TUIs too.

I think Kate is a modular editor that is used within other KDE programs, such as KDevelop (which is outstanding)

Accessibility (I'm thinking blind / partially sighted) -- while a terminal is technically accessible, it is not a great experience.

There are some blind people who do use, and love, vim/Emacs, bit GUI editors which integrate with their OSes accessibility features are usually a better experience.

If you want an example, sometimes for errors vim prints something at the bottom, it's not clear to a screen reader if it should go read that, and why.

It's a simple, lightweight text editor that doesn't require abstruse knowledge to use.

Im not particularly overawed with emacs or vim features. I've seen some people give breathless demos explaining how cool it was that they could do certain things and not felt especially impressed, especially given the learning curve. They seemed to be optimizing for things I don't need to optimize for.

Before I learned vim all those years ago, it was really convenient to use Kate with fish (sftp) to "mount" and edit remote files.

I would use this to edit HTML, CSS, and JS (and later PHP) on my FreeBSD servers which hosted my websites.

Once I learned revision control (hg mercurial) I largely stopped modifying files directly on the remote host so I had less of a need for an sftp client built into my text editor.

I used Kate fulltime up to the moment that I moved away from KDE due to the KDE3.0 fiasco. I took that moment to finally really learn Vim.

Kate is lightweight yet versatile; despite what the screenshots might suggest. This is due to the extremely well-done integration in KDE: for example, the file browser is (was?) really just the file browser konqueror from KDE, Kate has to do hardly anything for that, just "wrap" it. Same for syntax highlighting, terminal, snippets, keybindings, windows chrome, and so on. Kate is really mostly a neat wrapper around a lot of existing KDE parts and libs (and that is an achievement, I don't mean that negatively).

With Vim, I often say "Unix is my IDE", with Kate that could be translated to "the Desktop Environment is your IDE".

They are good as Vim, Emacs, Atom, Notepad++, etc. I used a lot of text editors over the years.

They are all good enough for programming work and are nigh indistinguishable from each other unless you go deep.

Maybe unless it's Atom, but I think they had improved their performance over the years.

Because it is no longer 1980, and the world has long since moved on.

I don't use Kate, but lately I've been using VS code instead of vim. Well, I do minor/quick single file edits in vim but more and more I use VS code.

I'm just faster doing things like cutting/pasting between multiple files, splitting screens, multi-line cursors, with a GUI text editor over vim.

No, I'm not interested in putting even more time into time/effort/space-in-my-memory/etc into learning vim's keyboard combos to effectively do this stuff.

1. There are a lot of users that are just not comfortable with working at a shell prompt. Graphical editors mirror the basic Mac or Windows workflow (open folder, double click on file, edit) and key bindings.

2. Syntax highlighting & formatting is better because of support for multiple fonts & better control of color.

3. Integration with other graphical apps. Kate is used as a component inside of many other KDE tools, so when you edit a file, the behavior is consistent and the key bindings are consistent.

4. Better integration with the desktop environment (in this case KDE). For example, I can open a file on a remote machine from the file open dialog. The file open dialog isis keychain aware, and can connect to any host that the desktop environment can (with KDE, that is almost anything that has file-like objects and remote protocol). You can do some editor be able to open a message from an IMAP server like I'm browsing files on localhost.

Kate is more like a Notepad++ or TextWrangler on Mac. It's a solid editor, but not an Emacs, vim, or VSCode level.

For me the most important benefits of GUI text editor are:

1. Selection and system clipboard integration. 2. Ability to quickly scroll to look something without moving the cursor, then return where I was by pressing an arrow key (one of the largest pain points of emacs for me). 3. Proportional fonts with proper text rendering, especially for notes.

I use 1 and 2 almost on a subconscious level, and it's hard for me to be productive in an editor which doesn't support these features. I'm sure, vim users can relate.

Try highlighting a block of text and copy pasting it to some other program.

I already beat you to it cuz I used my mouse lol (and I don't have unwanted line numbers and garbo whitespace in the pasted text, to boot).

Cristoph is german. Meaning Kate already started drinking four years ago :)

Only in some backward countries can you vote before you're allowed to drink. Which only hurts democracy as you can't celebrate or forget the results of the first election you participate in.

But perfectly ripe for an OnlyFans fundraiser /s

I've used kate a lot in the past but my favourite editor pick has to go to Visual Studio Code with the vi extension, followed by vi.

Visual Studio Code feels like what kate promised to be but never was, mainly due to all the bugs and lack of love for extensions.

Thus, the world is forced to endure webview resource hogs that are designed to phone home extensively just to be able to experience what kate promised but never delivered.

Kate is a replacement for Notepad++ or TextEdit, not VSCode. That's KDevelop territory.

This bug got recently fixed: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429943

KDE Neon (https://neon.kde.org/) is pretty great. It's based off the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, but is less bloated and gets KDE Frameworks updates quicker than Kubuntu.

I have been using Manjaro KDE for several months now on my daily driver, I must say I like them both.

Main issues was finding few packages with a different name than the one used on Debian based distros.

I didn't make many changes on KDE since I'm not a huge fan of customization, it's fast and has a really good look by default, same things I love of few distros shipping with GNOME such as PopOS.

I use openSUSE tumbleweed with Plasma and the experience is really great.

My primary environment has been KDE on Fedora for the last 20 years or so.

I can't say my "day-to-day machine", because that is (unfortunately) windows 10 - due to my day job. However, after work, i spend nearly as many hours on my personal machine which is linux...and that machine runs Fedora 32 for the last several months (I recently switched over from 2 or so years of Linux Mint usage). When i started with Fedora 32 i started running KDE (and KDE is typically not a choice i tend to make for my DE)...Mind you, i had not run KDE for almost a decade because it used to be too heavy and slow to run for whatever old machines that i used as my personal laptops. But lately, KDE seems to be lighter...i won't go as far to say as light as, say, xfce (and to be fair i have not conducted any fair test between xfce and kde); but KDE nowadays is certainly way better than it used to be.

Fedora. After using Ubuntu (KDE Neon since it came out) since basically 4.10 I'm really liking it!

I'm using KDE on KUbuntu on my work laptop day-to-day for the last 18 months.

But I've been using it for longer than that as I do recall using it for half of my university too. I recall I was using MATE before switching.

I've been using Plasma on NixOS, switched from GNOME 3 because I was having terrible issues with the Nvidia drivers (it may have since been fixed). It's fine although I kinda miss gedit and the GNOME terminal emulator.

You should, it provides a phantastic editing experience.