Kate is my daily driver for +10yrs now. I could never find the time to learn vim or emacs. Kate just has everything I need, such as regexp/escape search&replace or block cursor mode editing. And for anything I cannot do in Kate, I'm using some quick scripting with inline perl or bash.
Thank's to KIOSlaves (what's the 2020 name for that?), editing files on remote hosts is just an sftp://.... away. This usually works fine on stable connections (on unstable connections, mosh+vim will give a better usage experience).